Express API Validation Essentials
User input can be dangerous. You already know you need to validate any data your Express API receives. Without it, your API could crash horribly when it receives badly formatted data. You might end up with an unmaintainable database full of junk data.
Skipping out on validation leaves you vulnerable. Without it you could end up leaking sensitive user data. Or worse, you could lose control of your servers and be held to ransom by malicious attackers.
Eek, the thought of getting API validation wrong is kinda scary.
You want to avoid all these potential headaches. You sit down with Express and try and put in place all the things you need for a great API validation solution:
- Parsing requests
- Validating requests
- Sending back validation errors in a useful format
It seems simple at first, but you quickly end up overwhelmed. You get stuck trying to choose from a whole heap of different validation libraries. You're not sure how to properly integrate the library you've picked with Express. But wait, you also need to figure out what to do with validation errors... and then you need to invent your own error response format too?!
It's all very confusing.
To make it worse, you can't seem to find any API validation best practices for the Express framework. What you have works, but it's clumsy. You're worried that you're doing it the wrong way.
You know there must be a better way to handle validation in your Express APIs, but you don't know what it is.
What if you had a go-to validation library? A library which you trusted and could integrate into your Express APIs with ease.
Wouldn't it be amazing if you knew how to send awesome, standardized error responses?
You could confidently apply validation best practices to every Express API you create. You would be able to focus your time on building features. You would have validation taken care of.
Implementing validation in Express APIs takes up way more of your time than it should.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
Learn the essentials of Express API validation with my book. With it you'll gain a deep understanding of "the Express way" for validation. Learn how to validate requests and send back awesome error responses with ease. Discover the power of the JSON Schema and Problem Details specifications. Then use them to help you conquer validation in Express.
