I'm building a simple web app using Node.js and Express 4, and I want to implement a "follow" feature. While inspecting the Github website, I noticed that it utilizes a form with a follow button which posts to the server to follow a user. This approach seems quite effective because it doesn't require reloading the page, just like in GitHub.
However, I'm having trouble figuring out how to achieve this within Express 4. Whenever I try adding code inside the .post route, it always results in a page reload. In jQuery's ajax method, I believe you can simply return false to prevent any changes to the page while still sending the request. That's exactly what I need for my RESTful API since I want to add the user to the current user's following without relying on jQuery specifically for this function. It would be ideal if I could accomplish this directly in Express, but any assistance is welcome.
views/user.handlebars
<h1>{{user.displayName}}</h1>
<p>@{{user.username}}</p>
<form action="" data-userid="{{user._id}}" method="post">
<button name="follow" type="submit">Follow</button>
</form>
routes/users.js
app.route('/:username')
.get(function(req, res) {
// Fetch :username user from API and load information
...
})
.post(function(req, res) {
// Prevent page reload
???
// Add PUT :username user to current user's following array
...
});