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I have been following this tutorial which incorporates using the Jade template engine and Stylus css processor to achieve cleaner html syntax and compiled css.

Most of the tutorial was straight forward, with a few tailored differences:

I have all my logic in server.js (rather than app.js). 

I mimic'd the boilerplate directory structure available in this demo, which made it clear I will need to refactor.

It took me some time to understand why my index.jade file was returning an Error: Not Found. I referenced this stackoverflow to set my views to the right subdirectory. It's annoying the error message is not more helpful.

app.set('views', __dirname + '/app/views/layouts');

With this change, I was finally getting the page returned, but the stylesheet was returning a 404 with a similar Not Found stack that referenced a "stylesheets" directory I had not created. I found this stackoverflow which suggested placing the .styl file in the public/stylesheets directory. 

app.use('public/javascripts',express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'public/javascripts'))); app.use('public/stylesheets',express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'public/stylesheets')));

Now, I have a front end... onward!

[fembytes]

Retrieving the ObjectID after a create or save of a Mongoose Model instance

I would just like to take a moment and celebrate writing my first POST api endpoint that creates a Mongoose object and saves it to the Mongodb. I held off celebrating after I wrote a GET, but now it's proper time. The hardest part about writing the POST was figuring out why I kept being unable to retrieve the new object's id. Searching surfaced what seemed to be simply accessing the "._id" or ".id" attribute of the new object instance. However, I kept getting errors of the form:

return this._id.toString(); ^ TypeError: Cannot call method 'toString' of undefined at model. (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/schema.js:45:23) at VirtualType.applyGetters (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/virtualtype.js:52:25) at model.Document.get (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/document.js:376:18) at model.Object.defineProperty.get [as id] (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/document.js:609:41) at Promise. (server.js:127:35) at Promise. (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/promise.js:120:8) at Promise.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:95:17) at Promise.emit (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/promise.js:57:38) at Promise.complete (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/promise.js:68:20) at complete (node_modules/mongoose/lib/mongoose/model.js:73:13)

or simply an "undefined" value when logging the .id or ._id property. It turns out the model was defined incorrectly because the '_id' property was specified as a string, like this:

contestData = { _id: String, words: [String], time_limit: Number, genre: [String], status: String, entries: [postData] };

Once the _id property was removed from the model definition, the _id property was accessible as expected.

contestData = { words: [String], time_limit: Number, genre: [String], status: String, entries: [postData] }; var contestSchema = new mongoose.Schema(contestData); var Contest = mongoose.model('Contest', contestSchema); app.post('/api/contests/new', function(request, response) { var c = new Contest(); c.words = request.body.words; c.time_limit = request.body.time_limit; c.genre = request.body.genre; c.status = "new"; c.entries = []; c.save(function (err) { if (err) return handleError(err); }); console.log('Saved: %s', c._id); response.redirect('/api/contests/' + c._id);