Http Request

The HttpRequest object is about gathering input from the browser.

There are 3 ways to input data from the request object:

• URL paramaters using req.params;
• Query parameters using req.query;
• HTML forms parameters using req.body

URL with parameters

Read about routes with parameters here

Query paramaters

Query parameters can be sent into a route using a ? after the route name.

For example a URL like:

http://localhost:3000?name=Jo&last_name=Bloggs

have query parameters that can be read like this:

    var name = req.query.name;
    var last_name = req.query.last_name;

req.body

To read parameters sent from HTML forms to the server you use the body attribute on the HttpRequest object sent into routes.

The HTML form might look like this:

<form action="/add_product" method="POST">
    <label>Product name: <input type="text" name="product_name" ></label>
    <input type="submit">
</form>

The product_name form parameter will be available on the server side in the req.body attribute in a route setup like this:

app.post('/add_product', function(req, res){
 var formData = req.body;
 console.log(formData.product_name);
 res.render('product', {product_name :  formData.product_name});
});