Heard is an application that aims to foster a safe, anonymous community of secret sharers and secret bearers. Users can choose to share a confession or start a message thread about a specific topic. The application design takes a mobile-focused approach as most of the interactions will likely take place sporadically throughout the day on an accessible device.
Heard features a fully functional user authentication system, complete with a demo user login and error handling for incomplete entries. Upon successful login, the user will be redirected to a home page where the user can choose to participate in the application as a listener or create confessions or message threads.
Users can create topics that open message threads, or proceed directly to an index of topics. From a side menu, they can edit and/or delete the threads that they created.
Within a chat, users are anonymized except for the last five characters of their user ID. New messages are fetched at regular short intervals from the server.
Topics are organized in the database so that they are affiliated with a user and an array of messages in Mongoose:
const TopicSchema = mongoose.Schema(
{
user: {
type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId,
required: true,
ref: "User",
},
...
messages: [
{
type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId,
ref: "Message",
},
],
...In order to create messages then, the frontend must send in not only the content of the new message, but the topicId of the topic the message is affiliated with. Authentication middleware grabs the userId from the JSON Web Token (JWT).
const createMessage = asyncHandler(async (req, res) => {
const { topicId, content } = req.body;
const userId = req.user._id
if (!topicId|| !content || !userId) {
res.status(400);
throw new Error("Data missing. need topic ID, content, and user ID");
}
const messageInfo ={
sender: userId,
content,
topicId
};
try {
const newMessage = await Message.create(messageInfo)
const fullMessage = await Message.findOne({_id : newMessage._id})
.populate('topicId')
const foundTopic = await Topic.findById(topicId)
if (foundTopic){
Topic.findByIdAndUpdate(topicId, {
messages: [...foundTopic.messages, fullMessage._id]
})
res.status(200).json(fullMessage)
}
}catch(error) {
res.status(401).json({message: 'problem in messages controller', error: error})
}
});It is then populated with its topicId before the topic is found and updated by appending the message to its list of messages using findByIdAndUpdate().
Updating the title's title and / or mood or deleting it is simpler, involving mainly the findById and findByIdAndUpdate methods, since a new instance of a Message object does not have to be created.