This tutorial takes about 20 minutes to complete and presents a standard order creation workflow. You start by listing books in stock, add a new customer, and then create an order.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you must have command line access to curl and be able to send requests to the Bookstore Management API. You can integrate the API with your test environment or run it locally.

To learn how to run the API locally, see Test with JSON Server.

Step 1: Get the book inventory

To add a book to an order, you must know its id. We will use GET with the books endpoint to obtain a list of books to choose from.

  1. To list the books in stock, enter curl -X GET {server_url}:{port}/books, using your own server and port:

    The Bookstore Management API returns a 200 OK and a response body in the following format:

     {
   "id": "8ajv",
   "title": "Infinite Jest",
   "author_last_name": "Wallace",
   "author_first_name": "David Foster",
   "publisher": "Little, Brown",
   "year_published": 1996,
   "ISBN-10": 9780316073851,
   "genre": "fiction",
   "format": "hardcover",
   "condition": "new",
   "price": "24.99",
   "in_stock": 2
 }

  2. Choose a book id and note it for later use.

Step 2: Create a customer

When you create an order, you must specify a customer. We will use POST with the customers endpoint to add a new customer who has not yet visited the store.

  1. To create a customer, enter the following request:

     curl -X POST '{server_url}:{port}/customers' \
 --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 --data '{
     "last_name": "Jameson",
     "first_name": "Michael",
     "telephone": 2018724543,
     "email": "mjameson@gmail.com",
     }'

    The Bookstore Management API returns a 201 Created and a response body similar to the following:

     {
   "id": "2ogb",
   "last_name": "Jameson",
   "first_name": "Michael",
   "telephone": 2018724543,
   "email": "mjameson@gmail.com"
 }

  2. Note the id for use in the next step.

Step 3: Create an order

Now that you have a book and a customer, use POST with the orders endpoint to create a new order.

Note:
The book_id property value is an array. To add multiple books to an order, you might use ["9hne", "7dpc"], where each number is the id for one book.

  • To create an order, enter the following request. Add the value of book id to book_id and the value of customer id to customer_id.

      curl -X POST '{server_url}:{port}/orders' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data `{
      "order_date": "2024-02-22",
      "number_of_items": 1,
      "customer_id": "3mys",
      "book_id": ["8ajv"]
      }'

    The Bookstore Management API returns a 201 Created and a response body similar to the following:

      {
    "id": "8kdt",
    "order_date": "2024-04-19",
    "items": 1,
    "customer_id": "3mys",
    "book_id": [
      "5rzn"
    ],
    "subtotal": "9.99",
    "tax": "0.89",
    "total": "10.88"
  }

What to do next

Now that you know how to manage customers and orders, proceed with your integration or browse other tutorials to learn about the Bookstore Management API.