body-parser-demo

What is body parsing middleware even doing anyway??

This is a demo of what might happen if we didn't have a body parser, and then an example of the lovely world where we do have one.

That's nice how do I run this code

Glad you asked:

npm install to, uh, install stuff we need

npm start to, uh, start the thing

K now what, how do I use it

Great questions. You're gonna wanna hit those routes, so we can use something like Postman to simulate making all kinds requests to our server. Let's start by hitting the route for POST /badway (PS these are POST routes because those usually have a body that we'd wanna do something with):

Now go check your server console. You should see a log of the body we had to parse manually.

You can use Postman to make another request, this time to POST /goodway to hit the other route. Again, check the console, and you'll see the body object.

Both my POST requests printed the same thing, what's the difference

You're right!! Go check out the code for each route. You'll see in the /badway route, we had to do a lot more work to get the body object to look nice and usable. However, in the /goodway route, it's way simpler. I tried to leave lots o' comments explaining what the heck is going on with the code. Hopefully this helps explain a little bit of what body parser middlewares are doing, and why we want/need them :)