Step 7: Sending your blog post to your server

So far we have been requesting data from our server. But we can also send data to the server to be stored somewhere.

HTTP request methods

All requests use one of the HTTP methods. The main ones are: GET, PUT, POST and DELETE.

app.get deals with requests that use the GET HTTP method.

The POST http request method

When sending data to the server, we use the POST http request method, instead of GET. To understand the difference, follow the "POST vs GET" link in the keywords section below.

Let's try POSTing some text to the server.

We're going to add a form to the index.html page, so that you can write your blogposts from there.

Open up the index.html file in your text editor. If you have a look, you should see this:

index.html

<div class="entry-container">
    <!--PASTE YOUR CODE HERE!! -->
</div>

Replace the greyed-out comment with this code snippet:

index.html

<h3>Create a blog post</h3>
<form action="/create-post" method="POST">
    <textarea name="blogpost" rows="10" cols="14"></textarea>
    <button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>

Let's look at this form a bit more closely.

• The form has a text area and a Send button.

• The action attribute is the endpoint form data will be sent to.

• The name attribute will be used later to reference the data.

When you hit Send, the form will send a POST request to the server, using whatever is in the action attribute as the endpoint. In our case it's /create-post. So on our server, we will need to write some code to deal with requests that come in on the POST /create-post endpoint.

Receiving the blog post on the server

Data doesn't come through the server in one go; it flows to the server in a stream. Think of a stream as water flowing from a tap into a bucket.

If we were writing a pure Node server, we would have to think about how to collect the stream of data properly. But luckily for us, Express handles all of that stuff under the hood.

All you need to do is define a route to deal with requests that come through on the /create-post endpoint.

Let's remind ourselves of a GET route in Express:

server.js

app.get('/my-lovely-endpoint', function (req, res) {
    res.send('Hello there!');
});

But this time we want to define a route to deal with a POST request. What do you think you would need to do differently? Experiment and see if you can define a route for the /create-post endpoint!

For now, make your /create-post handler do this: console.log('/create-post').

If you need a hint, ask a mentor or chat to your neighbour and see if you can work it out together!

If you manage to successfully handle requests on the POST /create-post endpoint, you're ready to move on to step 8!