jim68000 / legal_providers

TA Tech Test

This is a very simple implementation of the test requirements in node.js

To install: cd to the folder containing this file and type npm install To run: run npm run server. The server runs on port 3000s

The app exposes two endpoints:

Individual records

/v1/provider/{id} - this extracts a single legal provider from the data.

http://localhost:3000/v1/provider/1 should return Moore-Watson

The app simply rejects out of range ids.

Filtered response

providers?{paramName}={paramValue} - the filters the entire list of providers using the keywords supplied as arguments. You can search using all the column names from the CSV: id, name, address1, city, postcode, phone, org_type, cat_crime, cat_debt, cat_housing, cat_immigration_or_asylum, cat_welfare_benefits

Cat values are either 0 or 1; all others must be exact

Notes on implementation

This is very bare bones and there are a lot of things missing that I would normally regard as essential. Error messaging is minimal and testing is crude.

Normally for this sort of API we would expect data to be stored in some sort of storage mechanism, either a KV store like Redis or a full database like Postgres. However as the data is very small and static I've chosen to load it into memory at start up instead. This keeps the implementation small.

Notes on dependency choices:

CSV is the only NPM CSV library with a synchronous parse and load; all others are stream based, which would have added a considerable layer of complexity to the code.

Express is my default HTTP framework. I considered HAPI but felt that learning a new framework (even if I would only need to know the next bit after 'Hello, world') was overkill.