Web API

Based on simple REST principles, the lab169 API endpoints return JSON metadata about brand, model, os, screensize and image directly from the Phones database.

Request

The lab169 API is based on REST principles. Data resources are accessed via standard HTTP requests in UTF-8 format to an API endpoint.
The API makes use of CRUD Functionality which implies the following actions:

Method	Action	Path
GET	Retrieves Products in database	/api/retrieve
POST	Creates Products in database	/api/create
PUT	Updates Products within database	/api/update
DELETE	Deletes Products in database	/api/delete

The URI for each Method contains the scheme and authority of the URI -> "http://localhost:3000" + the path to which each Method corresponds

Parameters with each Method

There are 6 Parameters in total to control the API (not each method needs every parameter) but they do each have there own requirement and description.

Id - once a product has been added the system gives a new id on ascending order - this needs to be an integer
Brand - Brand of the phone - This needs to be a string
Model - Model of the phone - This needs to be a string
Os - Operating system the phone runs on - This needs to be a string
Image - Image representing the phone - This needs to be an URL
Screensize - The size of the screen in inches - This needs to be a number

Method	Parameters needed	Example
GET	None OR Id OR Brand OR Model OR (Model AND Brand)	GET Method with no Parameters retrieves all products within database
POST	ALL Parameters Needed (apart from id, which the api creates upon POSTing)	POST Method with: {brand:"Apple",model:"Iphone 6",os: "iOS",image: URL,screensize: 8}, creates an id (e.g id=2) corresponding with the data of the JSON object
PUT	ALL Parameters needed; Id is locator, the rest you can change	PUT Method with existing id can change all data within that JSON object. e.g. Instead of in the above example the model being Iphone 7 it could instead be Iphone 6 with screensize 7
DELETE	Only Parameter of id is needed	If you wanted to delete your created Object, giving the DELETE Method the parameters "Id" with an id in the database would delete that product. In our example giving the json data id=2 would get rid of the now Iphone 6

Response Status Code

Our Web API responses all include a JSON Object with MIME Type 'application/json'.
With each response there is a corresponding Status Code:

Status Code	Description
200	OK - The request has succeeded. The client can read the result of the request in the body and the headers of the response.
201	Created - The request has been fulfilled and resulted in a new resource being created.
304	Not Modified - Data already exist within the Database
400	Bad Request - The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The message body will contain more information.
403	Forbidden - The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.
404	Not Found - The requested resource could not be found. This error can be due to a temporary or permanent condition.The message body will contain more information.
500	Internal Server Error. You should never receive this error ,whilst your API is running because our clever coders catch them all …