Creating documents in Express - Try It Yourself

Creating Documents with Express

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple web server that can create and serve text documents on request. This is useful for generating reports, notes, or any text content dynamically.

🎯 Goal: Build an Express server that creates a text document from given data and serves it to the user when they visit a specific URL.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an Express app instance

Set up a route to handle GET requests at /document

Generate a text document content dynamically

Send the generated document as a downloadable file to the client

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Web servers often need to generate and send files like reports, invoices, or logs dynamically to users.

💼 Career

Knowing how to create and serve files with Express is a common task for backend developers working with Node.js.

1

Set up Express app

Create a variable called express by requiring the 'express' module. Then create an Express app instance called app by calling express().

Express

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use require('express') to import Express and then call it as a function to create the app.

2

Create document content variable

Create a variable called documentContent and assign it the string 'This is a sample document created with Express.'.

Express

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

// Create documentContent variable
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact string to documentContent.

3

Add route to serve document

Use app.get to create a route for '/document'. Inside the route handler, use res.setHeader to set 'Content-Disposition' to 'attachment; filename="sample.txt"' and 'Content-Type' to 'text/plain'. Then send documentContent as the response using res.send(documentContent).

Express

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

const documentContent = 'This is a sample document created with Express.';

// Add GET route for '/document'
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use app.get with '/document' and set headers before sending the content.

4

Start the Express server

Use app.listen to start the server on port 3000. Provide a callback function that logs 'Server running on port 3000' to the console.

Express

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

const documentContent = 'This is a sample document created with Express.';

app.get('/document', (req, res) => {
    res.setHeader('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="sample.txt"');
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
    res.send(documentContent);
});

// Start server on port 3000
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use app.listen(3000, () => { console.log(...) }) to start the server.