Generating the comment controller

Summary

In this lesson, we generate the create-comment action in the CommentController and implement the logic for creating comments in our Sails application.

Key steps:

1. Generate the action using:

   sails generate action comment/create-comment

2. Define the required inputs:

   • article ID (number, required)

   • commenter name (string, required)

   • comment body (string, required)

3. Create the comment in the database and associate it with the correct article.

4. Redirect the user back to the article page to display the new comment.

In the next lesson, we will work on the view where users can add comments.

Transcript

Okay, so we are almost wrapping up setting up a comment system—at least a basic one—for this awesome blog with Sails.

Right now, we have a route pointing to the CommentController and the create-comment action, which doesn’t exist yet. So let’s generate it using:

sails generate action comment/create-comment

Now, if we check our project, we’ll see a new file: create-comment.js.

Defining inputs

Inside this action file, we need to define some inputs:

• ID (the article ID) → type: number, required

• Commenter (name of the person commenting) → type: string, required

• Body (the actual comment text) → type: string, required

Saving the comment

Next, we write the logic to create the comment and associate it with the correct article.

const comment = await Comment.create({
  commenter: inputs.commenter,
  body: inputs.body,
  article: inputs.id // Foreign key linking to the article
}).fetch();

The article ID acts as a foreign key, linking the comment to the correct article.

Redirecting after submission

Once the comment is created, we want to refresh the page to display the new comment:

return exits.success({
  redirect: `/article/${comment.article}`
});

This ensures that after submitting a comment, the user stays on the same article page and sees their comment immediately.

In the next lesson, we will build the view where users can add comments.