Handling API call errors with Axios - api

Question

Hi I'm using Axios to build my first API call app , the API I'm trying to get data from is the Pokemon API database pokeapi.co. The code in my app.js document to make the API call and use the data looks like this:
app.get("/", function(req, res){
res.render("home.ejs");
});
app.get("/data", async(req, res) => {
var inputSearch = req.query.searchTerm;
axios.get('https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/' + inputSearch) //The API
.then((body) => {
var pokeData = body.data;
res.render("data.ejs", {EJSpokeData: pokeData});
})
.catch((err) => {
res.send('Data not found', err.statusCode);
})
});`
This links to a form in an ejs document that looks like this:
<form action="/data" method="GET" id="searchForm">
<input type="text" id="searchBox" placeholder="Enter Pokemon name or ID number.." name="searchTerm">
<input type="submit" value="Submit" id="submit">
</form>
The API is called when the user enters either the Pokémon's name or its ID number into the input to be passed to Axios, my system works fine and returns the data I need, however the name can't be capitalized as the name values in the central API are all lower case so capitalizing a name will cause the system to search for a value that isn't in the API and eventually time out the app giving me the error message "localhost didn’t send any data".
This will also occur if the user spells a name wrong or enters an ID number that isn't present in the API. Also, if the user leaves the input field blank a crash occurs as my ejs document tries to process data that is not present. Is there any way to launch some kind error page if the get request doesn't return any data? Is there any way to prevent the submit request being activated if the input field is blank?
I've tried to res.render an error page in the .catch section but it doesn't see to work, can anyone help?

Answer 1

I don't know anything about express specifically so I can't help you with how to render things, but your API questions I can help with.
If we want to call the API with a lower case name that's easy! We don't need to care about what the user types into the input because we can convert it to lower case before calling the API:
var inputSearch = req.query.searchTerm.toLowerCase();
If we want to ignore empty strings, we can use a conditional statement. There are lots of ways to check for empty strings but the easiest is to just say if (myString) {...} because an empty string will evaluate to false while all other strings are true.
if (inputSearch) {
/* ...axios... */
} else {
res.send("Empty search term");
}