Birmingham | 26-SDC-Mar | Chioma Okeke | Sprint 3 | Middleware Exercises

[JanefrancessC]

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Changelist

Added two Express server middleware implementations.

custom-middleware

Implements two custom Express middlewares:

• extractUsername reads the X-Username header and attaches it to req.username.
• parseJsonArrayBody manually collects incoming request body chunks, parses them as JSON, and validates that the result is an array of strings.

This version demonstrates low-level request handling without relying on Express built-in body parsing.

off-the-shelf-middleware

Replaces the custom body parsing middleware with express.json().

This version highlights a key difference in Express behaviour: express.json() only processes requests when the Content-Type: application/json header is present. As a result, earlier curl requests using --data without explicitly setting the content type were not parsed correctly.

[LonMcGregor]

Good work on this task, I have a couple of comments however.

[LonMcGregor]

Did you mean to commit this change to this file here?

[JanefrancessC]

No, it was an error. That's why i deleted the file

[LonMcGregor]

Can you fix it so that this file is no longer listed in the "changed files" for this pull request?

[LonMcGregor]

If the user is not authenticated, should the app be returning anything?

[JanefrancessC]

For this exercise, if X-username isn't present, req.username is set to null. My understanding of it is that the middleware will recognise authenticated users but not enforce authentication.

[LonMcGregor]

Typically if someone is not authorised or not authenticated we might want the app to behave a bit differently. Here is says not authenticated but still returns data. Is there any alternative approach you could take?