node.js & express: for loop and `app.get()` to serve articles

express, javascript, node.js

Solution

Make use of middlewares to better handle the requests. I assume you will have tens/hundreds of posts, adding routes for them like what you've done, is not so elegant.

Consider the following code; I am defining routes of `/posts/:legId` form. We will match all requests to this route, fetch the article and render it.

If there are handful of routes to be defined you could make use of regular expression to define them.

// dummy legs
var legs = {
  a: 'iMac',
  b: 'iPhone',
  c: 'iPad'
};

app.get('/posts/:leg', fetch, render, errors);

function fetch(req, res, next) {
  var legId = req.params.leg;

  // add code to fetch articles here
  var err;
  if (!legs[legId]) {
    err = new Error('no such article: ' + legId);
  }

  req.leg = legs[legId];
  next(err);
}

function render(req, res, next) {
  res.locals.word = req.leg;
  res.render('index');
}

function errors(err, req, res, next) {
  console.log(err);

  res.locals.error = err.message;
  // render an error/404 page
  res.render('error');
}

Hope this helps, feel free to ask me any questions you may have.

Problem

I'm working on a node js express application that uses app.get() to serve the different web addresses. So `app.get('/',{});` serves the home page, `app.get('/login'{ });` serves the login page, etc. Is it good practice to programatically serve pages using a for loop, like in this example? ``` var a = ["a", "b", "c"]; a.forEach(function(leg) { app.get('/' + leg, function(req, res){ res.render('index.ejs', { word : leg }); }); }); ``` `index.ejs` is just `<p><%= word %> </p>` So that site.com/a, site.com/b, and site.com/c are all webpages. I want to utilize this to run .foreach() on a list of all of the article titles (coming from a database of stored articles). EDIT: The website allows users to submit posts, which become "articles" in a database. I want this loop to route to new submitted articles after they've been posted. If I want to do `app.get('/' + newPageName);` for user submitted pages AFTER I've already started the server with `node server.js`, how is that achieved?

Original source