14.6. Studio: Spa User Signup

For this studio you will add functionality to allow users to sign up for your spa-day app.

The starter code has been modified from where you left off last class. Grab the refactored code on the user-signup-starter branch.

You’ll notice in this branch that the name field has been removed from the service selection form. Once we implement user-signup functionality, we can use a given user’s name to identify the spa client. We’ve also moved data into a Client model and out of the SpaDayController class.

In this studio, we’ll ask you to write another model, User. User and Client may at first appear redundant, but in the future as you develop your spa application, you may find a scenario where a user is logging in who is not also Client.

14.6.1. Getting Ready

Within spa-day, create the following files.

  1. Create a UserController in org.launchcode.spaday.controllers. Add the @Controller annotation, along with @RequestMapping("user") to configure routes into the controller.

  2. Create a new folder, user/ within resources/templates

  3. Create index.html and add.html templates within resources/templates/user/

  4. Create a User class within org.launchcode.spaday.models

14.6.2. Creating the Model

Your User class should have a few private fields with getters and setters: username, email, password.

14.6.3. Rendering the Add User Form

  1. In the UserController, create a handler method displayAddUserForm() to render the form. This handler should correspond to the path /user/add, and for now, it can just return the path to the add.html template.

    Tip

    Don’t forget to add /user/add to your path when you test your new features.

  2. Within the add.html template, create a form that accepts inputs for each of the User class properties. Include an additional password input field to verify the password input. The form should be set up to POST to /user.

  3. Be sure to set type="password" for the password and verify inputs, to ensure the passwords are not visible when being typed into the form. You can also set type="email" on the email input, which will enable some basic client-side validation. We’ll tackle validation in more detail in the next studio.

14.6.4. Processing Form Submission

  1. Within the UserController, create a handler method with this signature:

    public String processAddUserForm(Model model, @ModelAttribute User user, String verify) {
   // add form submission handling code here
}

    This will use model binding to create a new user object, user, and pass it into your handler method.

    Note

    You don’t need to store the User object anywhere for this studio. We’re focusing on form handling and validation in this exercise. If you want to keep track of users using the method we employed in the models lesson video, check out the Bonus Missions below.

  2. Check that the verify parameter matches the password within the user object. If it does, render the user/index.html view template with a message that welcomes the user by username. If the passwords don’t match, render the form again.

14.6.5. Refining Form Submission

  1. Once registered, we want the user to access the form selecting their spa services.

    1. In user/index.html, add a th:href element to take the user back to the root path, /, of the app, where the serviceSelection template will be rendered.

  2. If the form is re-rendered when a password is not verified, we should let the user know that their form was not properly submitted. Use model.addAttribute to add an error attribute, letting the user know that their passwords should match. This model attribute will need to correspond to an element in the template that will only render the error text when the passwords do not match.

  3. If we send a user back to re-populate the form, it would be nice to not clear their previous submission. We won’t need to save the password entries in this fashion.

    1. In the form submission handler, add the username and email fields of the submitted user as model attributes.

    2. Back in the form, add a value attribute to these form fields and make them equal to the model attributes.

14.6.6. Bonus Missions

  1. Add an id field to User, along with accessor methods (with appropriate access level). Create a UserData class within org.launchcode.spaday.data that provides access to a list of users via add, getAll, and getById.

    1. In the user/index.html view, display a list of all users by username. Each username should have a link that takes you to a detail page that lists the user’s username and email.

  2. Add a Date field in User, and initialize it to the time the user joined (i.e. when the User object was created). Display the value of this property in the user detail view.