Handling Contacts

Writing to the Database

For our contact form, we use a “Write” operation. We create a new instance of our model using the incoming form data and then use .save() to persist it to MongoDB.

Receive Data, Construct Model, Save

data/contacts.js

const mongoose = require("mongoose");

const contactSchema = new mongoose.Schema({
  name: String,
  email: String,
  message: String,
  postedDate: { type: Date, default: Date.now },
});

const Contact = mongoose.model("Contact", contactSchema);

class ContactOps {
  async createContact(formData) {
    try {
      const newContact = new Contact(formData);
      await newContact.save(); // Mongoose handles the insertion logic
      return { success: true };
    } catch (error) {
      return { success: false, error };
    }
  }
}

module.exports = new ContactOps();

The Route

routers/contactRouter.js

const express = require("express");
const router = express.Router();
const _contactOps = require("../data/contacts");

router.get("/", (req, res) => {
  res.render("contact");
});

router.post("/", async (req, res) => {
  // Pass the raw body directly to our data layer
  const result = await _contactOps.createContact(req.body);

  if (result.success) {
    res.render("contact", { message: "Thanks for reaching out!" });
  } else {
    res.render("contact", { message: "Whoops, something went wrong." });
  }
});

module.exports = router;

The View

views/contact.ejs

<form action="/contact" method="POST">
  <label>Name: <input type="text" name="name" required /></label>
  <label>Email: <input type="email" name="email" required /></label>
  <label>Message: <textarea name="message" required></textarea></label>
  <button type="submit">Send Message</button>
</form>

<% if (typeof message !== 'undefined') { %>
<p class="alert"><%= message %></p>
<% } %>

The Mechanism

1. new Contact(formData): Creates a transient Mongoose document in memory.
2. .save(): Asynchronously writes that document to the MongoDB collection.

⏭ Next: Clean Exits

We opened and used our connection to the database via mongoose.

Now let’s be polite and make sure we close it properly when we’re done.