Appoints-Api

Appoints-Api is a simple example appointment scheduler REST API built with Node.js, Express 4 and Mongodb. A client that consumes this API can be found at https://github.com/martijnboland/appoints-client.

Features

• Create, view, update and delete appointments
• Token-based authentication with 3rd party providers (Facebook & Google)
• Hypermedia API (HAL, see http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html)
• Full integration test suite

Getting started

1. Node.js needs to be installed on your machine

2. Make sure you have access to a MongoDB instance, either on your local machine or somewhere in the cloud. The test suite is configured by default to use a local database with the name 'appointstest'

3. Clone the repository:

    git clone https://github.com/martijnboland/appoints-api-node.git
   

4. Install packages:

    npm install
   

5. Create a config file for the development environment by copying /config/example.js to /config/development.js.

6. Run the server (default on http://localhost:3000/):

    node index.js
   

You can run the integration test suite with:

	npm test (*nix, Mac OS X)
	runtests.bat (Windows)

Usage

When the server is running locally, you can try the api with a browser, curl or an API testing tool like Postman. If you don't have a local server running, you can try the API at https://appoints-api.azurewebsites.net/ instead of http://localhost:3000/.

The default response content type is application/hal+json. It's also possible to request application/json by adding the Accept: application/json header to the request. POST, PUT and PATCH requests need to have their content-type set to application/json.

Start with GET http://localhost:3000/:

{
	"message": "Appoints service API",
	"details": "This is a REST api where you can schedule appointments for <insert business here>",
	"_links": {
		"self": {"href":"/"},
		"me": {"href":"/me"},
		"appointments" : {"href":"/appointments"}
	}
}

Following the links, you can see 2 other resources: /me and /appointments. Let's go to /me and see what happens:

{
	"message": "Access to /me is not allowed.",
	"details": "No Authorization header was found. Format is Authorization: Bearer [token]",
	"_links": {
		"auth_facebook": {"href":"/auth/facebook"},
		"auth_google": {"href":"/auth/google"}
	}
}

Alright, so we're not supposed to view the resource unauthenticated and we need to supply an authorization token. How can we get a token? Perhaps follow one of the links? We're going to try the Google route: http://localhost:3000/auth/google. At this point there are two options:

1. Do a GET request to http://localhost:3000/auth/google that will redirect to the Google authentication/authorization page that redirects back to our API after successful authorization. After this, we generate our own JWT token and redirect again with the access_token in the hash: http://localhost/auth/loggedin#access_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJK.... From here, things are unfortunately a bit hacky because this is the only place where the API doesn't return a nice JSON response but HTML with a script that posts the access_token back to the opener window:

   if (window.opener) { window.opener.postMessage(window.location.hash.replace("#access_token=", ""), "*"); }
   

This to facilitate browser clients from other domains that use a popup browser window for the authentication flow but can not access the access_token hash due to cross-domain restrictions. With postMessage() it's possible to send values between browser windows and different domains.

2. Do a POST request to http://localhost:3000/auth/google with an already obtained token via some client API. This generates our authorization token:

   {
   	"message": "Authentication successful",
   	"token": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjUzN2Y2Yjk4MzFhNTEyYWJjY2Q1OGE5OCIsImVtYWlsIjoibWFydGlqbmJvbGFuZEBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJkaXNwbGF5TmFtZSI6Ik1hcnRpam4gQm9sYW5kIiwicm9sZXMiOlsiY3VzdG9tZXIiXSwiaWF0IjoxNDAxMTI3NTYxLCJleHAiOjE0MDExMzExNjF9.eFjb_mQ413Dz8YUorVREuCYDvHrrZRopg89m-kD4Jh8",
   	"_links":{
   		"self": {"href":"/"},
   		"me": {"href":"/me"},
   		"appointments": {"href":"/appointments"}
   	}
   }

If things went alright, we now have the authorization token. Try the /me link again but now with the authorization header HTTP HEADER set:

Authorization: Bearer eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjUzN2Y2Yjk4MzFhNTEyYWJjY2Q1OGE5OCIsImVtYWlsIjoibWFydGlqbmJvbGFuZEBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJkaXNwbGF5TmFtZSI6Ik1hcnRpam4gQm9sYW5kIiwicm9sZXMiOlsiY3VzdG9tZXIiXSwiaWF0IjoxNDAxMTI3NTYxLCJleHAiOjE0MDExMzExNjF9.eFjb_mQ413Dz8YUorVREuCYDvHrrZRopg89m-kD4Jh8

which returns:

{
	"_links": {
		"self": {"href":"/users/537f6b9831a512abccd58a98"}
	},
	"userId": "89928749324",
	"provider": "google",
	"email": "someone@gmail.com",
	"displayName": "A google user",
	"roles":["customer"]
}

Looking good! Where can we go next? We still have one link left to try: /appointments. Here we can manage our appointments (create, view, update and delete with the standard GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE HTTP verbs). Let's create a new appointment by POSTing to /appointments (with the authorization header set properly). The data for the appointment is:

{
  "title": "Fresh haircut",
  "dateAndTime": "2014-06-01T14:45:00.000Z",
  "endDateAndTime": "2014-06-01T15:15:00.000Z",
  "duration": 30,
  "remarks": "Same as last time"
}

The response has HTTP status code 201 (created) and the body contains the newly created appointment:

{
	"_links":{
		"self": {"href":"/appointments/53838715fd51be21ee42b7d4"},
		"user": {
			"href":"/users/537f6b9831a512abccd58a98",
			"title":"A google user"
		}
	},
	"id":"53838715fd51be21ee42b7d4",
	"title":"Fresh haircut",
	"dateAndTime":"2014-06-01T14:45:00.000Z",
	"endDateAndTime": "2014-06-01T15:15:00.000Z",
	"duration":30,
	"remarks":"Same as last time"
}

The appointment is stored in the database and a GET request for /appointments returns all our appointments:

{
	"_links": {
		"self": {"href":"/appointments"}
	},
	"_embedded": {
		"appointment":[{
			"_links": {
				"self": {"href":"/appointments/53838715fd51be21ee42b7d4"},
				"user": {
					"href":"/users/537f6b9831a512abccd58a98",
					"title":"A google user"
				}
			},
			"id":"53838715fd51be21ee42b7d4",
			"title":"Fresh haircut",
			"dateAndTime":"2014-06-01T14:45:00.000Z",
			"endDateAndTime": "2014-06-01T15:15:00.000Z",
			"duration":30,
			"remarks":"Same as last time"
		}]
	},
	"count":1
}

Existing appointments can be modified or deleted at /appointments/:id with the PUT, PATCH and DELETE verbs. Let's say we want to reschedule the appointment. This can be done by sending a PATCH request to /appointments/53838715fd51be21ee42b7d4 with the new date and time:

{
  "dateAndTime": "2014-06-01T17:15:00.000Z",
  "endDateAndTime": "2014-06-01T17:45:00.000Z",
  "remarks": "Same as last time (rescheduled from 14:45 to 17:15)"
}

This returns the modified resource as response with HTTP status code 200:

{
	"_links":{
		"self":{"href":"/appointments/53838715fd51be21ee42b7d4"},
		"user":{
			"href":"/users/537f6b9831a512abccd58a98",
			"title":"A google user"
		}
	},
	"id":"53838715fd51be21ee42b7d4",
	"title":"Fresh haircut",
	"dateAndTime":"2014-06-01T17:15:00.000Z",
	"endDateAndTime": "2014-06-01T17:45:00.000Z",
	"duration":30,
	"remarks":"Same as last time (rescheduled from 14:45 to 17:15)"
}

Security warning

The authorization header contains sensitive information. Always use SSL when deploying an API like this in a production environment.