adamvig / gocoapi Goto Github PK

The API endpoint has changed from api.forecast.io to api.darksky.net.

• Days left in semester should never go below zero.
• When mealpoints are not available on My Gordon, the endpoint should return zero instead of returning an error.

Check for platform information on incoming request. If exists, save data to user's database entry.

Data is sent from app on X-Platform and X-Platform-Version headers with each request.

(Migrated from adamvig/adamvigdata/#54)

• Change to human-readable log output
• Change output level to trace

The current regression test only checks for 200 OK responses, but does not check if the returned data is in the correct format or of the correct type.

Looks like Chai has a plugin called chai-json-schema that would integrate well with the existing tests written with Mocha.

Missing:

• Set Property /setproperty username, password, propertyName, value
  Set a property in a user's doc. Search recursively for property, return descriptive error code if property or user does not exist.
• Create User /createuser username, password
  Create a user doc in the database, furnished with all necessary fields for initialization.

In the old API, every request was logged to the user's doc in the database by incrementing the number of requests the user had made to that endpoint.

This became less relevant when the app gained the autoload feature that requests data for all enabled modules every time the app is opened. It may be more relevant to keep separate global-level and user-level statistics, though the global statistics would be better generated by a logging/analytics platform such as New Relic.

User Statistics

• Last Login (useful for removing inactive users)
• Total number of requests
• Number of requests for each endpoint
• Device platform
• Device version

Duplicates #3.

Instead of using POST with authentication in the body, use GET (endpoint method is configurable in endpointName.ENDPOINT) and do not require authentication.

GoCoStudent/#84 must be completed before making this change.

CouchDB is currently hosted for free on CloudAnt.

Switching over to the actual server would allow for more control over the database configuration, faster data retrieval/storage, and higher security.

(Migrated from adamvig/adamvigdata/#49)

See 4TO5GUIDE for details on breaking changes.

After some research, it seems that the two best options for programmatic (not command-line) HTTP load testing are:

• Artillery
• loadtest

Artillery is good, but requires that variables for use in requests are defined in CSV files. It would be better for the test library to use exported variables from vars.js, where test credentials are already defined.

It looks like loadtest has a better API.

The app expects an array of lines of text from /nextmeal, but it is currently returning a string with newlines embedded.

Instead of returning zero meal points, return an informative error:

Cannot get mealpoints; transfers open Sept. 8

Instead of allowing unfettered access to the API, restrict access to users with generated API keys.

Currently, the database (the app only supports one database) is abstracted behind a simple interface supporting get and save operations, and nothing else. The database interaction is handled by the nano library. An instance of nano is instantiated in the db module and shared by all modules that depend on it.

Possible improvements:

• Add support for multiple databases
• Convert database to a class
• Add classes for models (Info and User should suffice)
  • Model will be a generic class for handling documents
  • Info and User will extend Model and add methods as well as instantiate the appropriate database for each one using the Database class
• Add static methods to Model for performing operations on multiple models at once.
  • Reference this article on structuring Node models when making design decisions

Endpoints should expect a parameter that tells them to skip cached data if it exists.

This allows for more predictable behavior when conducting load and regression tests, which report how long the requests took.

• Endpoint names are unnecessarily duplicated between filenames and config.ROUTES. Instead of depending on a list of endpoint names set in config.js, dynamically load endpoints based on their definitions in the routes directory.
• Endpoints are modular and have little code-duplication, which is a major improvement over the necessary copy-and-pasting to add a new endpoint to the legacy API. However, passing a configuration hash to a centralized function that takes care of creating the endpoints seems backwards. Instead, there should be an Endpoint class defined centrally that is instantiated in each endpoint's definition, and that endpoint should call the function that defines itself on the app object. Exploring ES6's chapter on Classes is an excellent resource on the subject.
• Testing is severely lacking. The existing regression test is a simplistic approach to ensuring that the API works from the outside, but there is no functional testing to ensure that each function is performing as expected.
  • Test coverage of helper functions located in /helpers.
  • Test coverage of endpoint getter and processor functions with dummy data.
  • Test schema of JSON returned in regression test to ensure that the API is returning the correct types of data.
  • Test API under load conditions.
• Code formatting is not standardized.
  • Add .jshintrc and .eslintrc and fix all issues that come up (copy files from GoCoStudent).
  • Replace all function () {} with () => {}.
  • Replace any var with either let or const.

Currently, each request is sent to /api/[app version], which is helpful but somewhat backwards. Instead, the app should send requests to /api/ with the Accept-Version header, then the API version can be changed and the app will never know the difference.

Restify supports versioned routes out of the box.

API versioning on the request-level should go hand-in-hand with API versioning on the release level, meaning that this project should get on a release schedule using semantic versioning.

Use the default ESLint configuration to enforce a huge number of stylistic rules.

Instead of returning only a friendly error message as text/plain, return a JSON object containing the following fields:

{
  description: "Actual description of error message for debugging purposes"
  message: "User-facing message, ex: Something went wrong! 🆘 "
}

This change should also come with more descriptive use of error codes.

Should return contents of the database document message in the Info database.

Currently, the cacheGlobal() method in cache.js is unused, and global caching seems to be entirely disabled. The whole file could be refactored to be clearer, as well.

This depends on #4 "Run CouchDB on server instead of externally", because testing the global cache would require modifying documents in the actual database (issue is now closed).

CouchDB leaves a lot to be desired. Its basic functionality is good, but it fails in two major areas:

1. querying: map and reduce functions are a hassle compared to SQL
2. space efficiency: since GoCo updates the database frequently, CouchDB takes up large amounts of storage with old revisions of documents

The advantage of CouchDB is quick and dirty data modelling. For example, it will be a challenge to convert the Highland Express data to a relational schema.

CouchDB is also a practical, if improper, solution for caching data. MySQL makes that much more difficult, so Etags and the Expires header should be used in place of a homegrown caching solution.

Using MySQL will make it easier to reduce data duplication. Instead of storing a number of requests for each endpoint and a total number of requests, the new schema can store just the number of requests per endpoint. A view can be created to sum the total number of requests for each user and the total number of requests for each endpoint.

A view can also be created to calculate the date and time of each user's last request based on a timestamp in the endpoint usage table.

A simple first attempt at a schema: