To-Do service API

Tutorial: Get a user by last name

In this tutorial, you learn the operations to call to get a user by the last_name property in a user resource.

This tutorial should take around 10 minutes to complete.

Before you start

Complete the Before you start a tutorial topic to ensure that you have the service installed on the development system you’ll use for the tutorial.
Enroll at least one user into the service, since you can’t retrieve the details of a user if none exist. To add a user, follow the Enroll a new user tutorial.

Get a user by last name

You need to use the GET method to retrieve the details of a user resource in the service using the last_name property.

To get a user by last name:

Make sure your local service is running, or start it by using this command, if it’s not.
```
 cd <your-github-workspace>/to-do-service/api
 json-server -w to-do-db-source.json
```
Open the Postman app on your desktop.
In the Postman app, create a new request with these values:
- HTTP METHOD: GET
- API Endpoint: /users
- Headers:
  - Content-Type: application/json
- Query Parameters: You can change the value of the last_name property to the last name of the user whose details you want to retrieve.
```
  {
      ?last_name=Martinez
  }
```
The full request should look like:
```
 {
     GET {base_url}/users?last_name=Martinez
 }
```
In the Postman app, choose Send to make the request.

Watch for the response body, which should return the user resource with the last_name property in your GET request.

 {
     "last_name": "Martinez",
     "first_name": "Marty",
     "email": "m.martinez@example.com",
     "id": 3
 }

After doing this tutorial in Postman, you might like to repeat it in your favorite programming language. To do this, adapt the values from the tutorial to the properties and arguments that the language uses to make REST API calls.

Next steps

Now that you know how to get a user by their last name, you can branch out by using other properties in the user resource in your GET request to retrieve the details of a specific user. To narrow down the number of user resources in your response, include more than one property in your request.

You can refine your GET requests by viewing the other read operations for the user resource:

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