Trying to return one random reply from a db in Javascript

February 11, 2023

When trying to create an API endpoint for, in this case, a sandbox environment, it currently returns the entire file as a result. What I would like is for it to return only one group of info but am new to JS and cannot figure out how to do it.

  app.get("/sandbox", function (req, res) {
    var sandbox = require("./api/sandbox.json");

    console.log("GET /sandbox Received: " + JSON.stringify(req.body));
    {
      return res.send(sandbox);
    }
  });

/api/sandbox.json is currently ~250 items formatted. Each contains three fields grouped. So "id" "response" and "footer". How do I get only one group at random to come back as a result?

For this, I really don’t know where to start. I’m just excited I got this far.

>Solution :

The following solution assumes that sandbox.json contains the valid array of elements.

You may use the following expression to pick the random element of the sandbox array

Math.floor(Math.random() * sandbox.length)

The resulting code could look more or less like this

app.get("/sandbox", function (req, res) {
    const sandbox = require("./api/sandbox.json"); 
    const result = sandbox[Math.floor(Math.random() * sandbox.length)];
    return res.send(result);
});