--description--

Besides GET, there is another common HTTP verb, it is POST. POST is the default method used to send client data with HTML forms. In REST convention, POST is used to send data to create new items in the database (a new user, or a new blog post). You don’t have a database in this project, but you are going to learn how to handle POST requests anyway.

In these kind of requests, the data doesn’t appear in the URL, it is hidden in the request body. The body is a part of the HTTP request, also called the payload. Even though the data is not visible in the URL, this does not mean that it is private. To see why, look at the raw content of an HTTP POST request:

POST /path/subpath HTTP/1.0
From: john@example.com
User-Agent: someBrowser/1.0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 20

name=John+Doe&age=25

As you can see, the body is encoded like the query string. This is the default format used by HTML forms. With Ajax, you can also use JSON to handle data having a more complex structure. There is also another type of encoding: multipart/form-data. This one is used to upload binary files. In this exercise, you will use a URL encoded body. To parse the data coming from POST requests, you must use the body-parser package. This package allows you to use a series of middleware, which can decode data in different formats.

--instructions--

body-parser has already been installed and is in your project's package.json file. require it at the top of the myApp.js file and store it in a variable named bodyParser. The middleware to handle URL encoded data is returned by bodyParser.urlencoded({extended: false}). Pass the function returned by the previous method call to app.use(). As usual, the middleware must be mounted before all the routes that depend on it.

Note: extended is a configuration option that tells body-parser which parsing needs to be used. When extended=false it uses the classic encoding querystring library. When extended=true it uses qs library for parsing.

When using extended=false, values can be only strings or arrays. The object returned when using querystring does not prototypically inherit from the default JavaScript Object, which means functions like hasOwnProperty, toString will not be available. The extended version allows more data flexibility, but it is outmatched by JSON.

--hints--

The 'body-parser' middleware should be mounted

(getUserInput) =>
  $.get(getUserInput('url') + '/_api/add-body-parser').then(
    (data) => {
      assert.isAbove(
        data.mountedAt,
        0,
        '"body-parser" is not mounted correctly'
      );
    },
    (xhr) => {
      throw new Error(xhr.responseText);
    }
  );