Planning the Questions Routes

Now that we have some solid concepts of what we're going to implement, 0:00 let's begin building the interface. 0:03 I'm not talking about the visual user interface. 0:05 I'm talking about the I in API or application programming interface. 0:08 In other words, we need to describe how the program talks with or 0:13 interfaces with the service we're building. 0:17 The interface to our API is made up of URL patterns. 0:20 Each URL pattern is known as a route. 0:24 Planning routes is an important step. 0:27 You don't want to make any changes once you launch your API, 0:29 as this would break applications that would rely on the data from API. 0:33 Let's look at an example URL, example.com/about/index.html. 0:37 This URL is the route to the index.html file in the about 0:45 folder located at the example.com domain. 0:50 This is why we call our URLs routes. 0:54 They route us to a specific resource location. 0:58 API routes follow the same logical structure 1:01 where the slashes describe the nested resources. 1:04 Resources to the left of each slash own the resources to the right. 1:07 If we start with our APIs most general root resource, 1:13 we can naturally build towards the dependent resources as we go. 1:16 Because we can't answer a question that doesn't exist yet, it makes sense for 1:20 our route resource to be a question. 1:24 Our best route is slash questions. 1:28 Notice it's questions plural and not question singular. 1:31 This indicates that the route provides access to 1:35 all the questions in our database. 1:38 This is a GET route which lets us read questions. 1:41 We need to post to the route /questions to create a question. 1:45 To read a specific question we can have the URL pattern of /questions/:id. 1:49 We can access a specific question by its ID. 1:55 This is a get request to this route and should return a single question. 1:59 We are going to be implementing the editing or 2:03 the deleting of questions in our API. 2:06 If you wanted to do either of those things you'd have to go into the database 2:08 manually and perform those actions. 2:12 Now that our question routes are complete let's build the answer routes next. 2:15