Building the backend for my band's website has been an exciting, challenging, and deeply educational process. Along the way, I’ve tackled a variety of issues—from setting up the comment section to refining the role-based permissions system. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through some of the hurdles I faced, how I solved them, and the valuable learning experiences that came out of the process.
Setting Up the Comment Controller, Route, and Model
The first challenge I ran into was setting up the comment system, which would allow users to make comments and reply to others. As we all know, handling user interactions like comments can get complicated quickly, especially when trying to build a scalable and clean solution.
Here’s what I did:
Comment Model: I started by defining the comment schema in MongoDB using Mongoose. Each comment has an associated user, content, and timestamp. For replies, I used a reference to the parent comment, allowing users to have nested conversations.
Comment Controller: I created functions for adding, deleting, and replying to comments. One issue I encountered was ensuring that the correct user could only edit or delete their comments. This required setting up strict checks in the controller and making sure the API routes were protected with authentication and authorization logic.
Comment Route: Once the controller was working, I set up routes that allowed users to post new comments, reply to existing ones, and delete comments. The routing required validation and error handling to ensure that users didn’t perform actions they weren’t authorized to do.
Troubleshooting involved several rounds of testing to get the comment threading functionality right. Specifically, handling nested replies and ensuring that users couldn’t delete comments they didn’t own took some time. However, after working through these edge cases, I was able to provide a clean commenting experience for the users.
Ensuring Routes Work Seamlessly
After getting the comment functionality working, I turned my attention to the other routes for user management, album creation, and more. One of the key challenges was making sure all the routes were protected correctly, particularly ensuring that only authorized users could access specific resources.
This is where I introduced role-based access control (RBAC) through the checkPermissions middleware. By implementing this middleware, I could easily enforce permissions for different types of users (e.g., admins, fans, or band members). This also required thorough testing to ensure that the routes were working as expected and that the roles were being checked correctly.
Roles and Permissions
Roles and permissions were the real challenge, but also the most rewarding. Initially, I was planning on having separate controllers for fans and band members—one for each type of user with their own set of logic. However, I reached out to the Node.js Slack group to get some advice, and the community suggested an alternative approach: use roles and permissions to handle access control in a more unified and scalable way.
This insight was a game-changer. Instead of writing separate controllers, I could create one set of routes and use middleware to enforce different permissions based on the user’s role. For example:
- Admins could manage users, assign roles, and access analytics.
- Band members could create and edit their own albums and tracks.
- Fans had the ability to interact with the content (like, comment, etc.) but had no administrative privileges.
With this approach, I was able to consolidate the logic for managing users and their actions into a single set of routes, making the code cleaner and more maintainable. The permissions were tied to each user’s role, and the middleware made sure that each action was properly authorized.
The system was flexible enough to allow for detailed control over each user’s abilities, and I had to debug several issues around ensuring that the middleware was properly intercepting requests and checking the user’s permissions. The solution involved structuring the code in a way that each route, depending on the action, would be checked against the user’s roles and permissions.
Once everything was set up, I was able to have clear control over who could do what—whether it was adding content, managing users, or simply commenting.
What's Next? Moving Forward
With the backend now mostly functional, I’m moving on to working on the favorites controller and rating controller. Once these are complete, I’ll start building the frontend for the website. It’s been a journey full of problem-solving and a lot of learning along the way.
I’ll admit, the backend for this website might be overkill for the scope of the project, but it’s been a great opportunity to dive deep into backend development and understand how robust systems can be built with the MERN stack. I’m excited to move forward with the frontend and begin the next chapter of this project.
Building this website has been incredibly fun and rewarding, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end!
This post was a journey through my process of solving backend challenges. If you’re working on a similar project or are considering building a web app with user authentication, role-based access, and more, I hope this gives you some insight into the problem-solving mindset needed to tackle these issues. Stay tuned for updates on the frontend development!
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