Introduction
Let’s extend the ‘Book’ example from the previous lesson and turn it into a small Library app.
Assignment
- If you haven’t already, set up a Git repository for your project with skeleton HTML/CSS and JS files. From here on out, we’ll assume that you have already done this.
-
All of your book objects are going to be stored in an array, so add a function to the script (not the constructor) that can take some arguments, create a book from those arguments, and store the new book object into an array. Your code should look something like this:
const myLibrary = []; function Book() { // the constructor... } function addBookToLibrary() { // do stuff here } - Write a function that loops through the array and displays each book on the page. You can display them in some sort of table, or each on their own “card”. It might help for now to manually add a few books to your array so you can see the display.
- While it might look easier to manipulate the display of the books directly rather than store their data in an array first, from here forward, you should think of these responsibilities separately. We’ll delve deeper into this concept later, but when developing applications, we want the flexibility to recreate elements (like our library and its books) in various ways using the same underlying data. Therefore, consider the logic for displaying books to the user and the book structures that hold all information as distinct entities. This separation will enhance the maintainability and scalability of your code.
- Add a “New Book” button that brings up a form allowing users to input the details for the new book and add it to the library: author, title, number of pages, whether it’s been read and anything else you might want. How you decide to display this form is up to you. For example, you may wish to have a form show in a sidebar or you may wish to explore dialogs and modals using the
<dialog>tag. However you do this, you will most likely encounter an issue where submitting your form will not do what you expect it to do. That’s because thesubmitinput tries to send the data to a server by default. This is whereevent.preventDefault();will come in handy. Check out the documentation for event.preventDefault and see how you can solve this issue! - Add a button on each book’s display to remove the book from the library.
- You will need to associate your DOM elements with the actual book objects in some way. One easy solution is giving them a data-attribute that corresponds to the index of the library array.
- Add a button on each book’s display to change its
readstatus.- To facilitate this you will want to create the function that toggles a book’s
readstatus on yourBookprototype instance.
- To facilitate this you will want to create the function that toggles a book’s
You’re not required to add any type of storage right now to save the information between page reloads. You will have the option to come back to this project later on in the course.