vcamelot / user_exp_api

User experience API

This is a test task covering creation of REST API in Laravel. The API gets user experience, and takes some fake data generated by RandomUser API, then combines it with user experience and saves this data to the database. API also allows to search for employee by ID or first/last name, and can display all employees.

Installation

• Clone the repository
• Create the database
• Create your own .env file from .env.example
• Set up database connection parameters in .env
• Run composer update
• Run php artisan migrate
• Run php artisan serve, the API will be available at http://localhost:8000/api/

Database

The database is quite simple and contains two tables: employees and experiences. The API operates Employee model which has one-to-many relation to Experiences model.

API endpoints

The documentation can be found in docs.yaml. Briefly, the API supports four endpoints:

GET /employees

Retrieves list of all employees

POST /employees

Creates new employee with experiences

GET /employees/:id

Retrieves employee with given ID

GET /search

Searches for employee by first or last name

Technology and approach

This is a simple API, therefore all logic is kept in controllers.

Since we are using a 3rd party API, failures can happen, therefore I catch the exception it can throw.

All requests and responses to the API are logged via Logger class. The logs are stored under storage/logs/api.log. If you wish to change the name of the log file, you can do this by adjusting settings in /config/logging.php

What can be improved

• Move all logic from controller into service containers
• Adjust the logs to keep only certain data instead of handling the whole response
• Create another middleware which would format the API response, thus avoiding duplicate code in the methods of controller
• Add Laravel passport authentication
• ...and many more