Your task is to refactor the GetProductsController without altering its existing functionality. This controller is used by an API route that provides a list of products to external services. It is vitally important that nothing is changed in the data that it returns.
The existing route, /api/products, returns all products and this functionally should remain unchanged.
We would like you to add a new route alongside it, /api/products/{section}, which will return all products belonging to the specified section.
We are looking to see your understanding and use of the Laravel ecosystem as well as adopting the latest PHP fundamentals and best practices. We want the code to be clearly readable, maintainable, type-safe and flexible to grow with future feature requirements.
Things to bear in mind:
- The API will be used by external actors so the state of the query parameters cannot be verified.
- How can we ensure that the functionality has not changed during the refactor?
- Don't do everything yourself, if there's a feature in Laravel or 3rd party package that can do what you want for you, use it.
As a point of reference within the task we would like you to adopt the Spatie Laravel PHP style guide which highlights the standard of code we are looking for.
The models and their relationships have already been established.
Set up your dev environment using the setup that you are most comfortable with. The project already includes Laravel Sail for your convenience.
Test data is provided through seeders. After running the php artisan migrate --seed command, your database should be ready for use.
While we understand the time-consuming nature of coding tasks, we kindly request that you limit yourself to a maximum of two hours on this task (not including any time required to setup your environment). Please do not worry if you can't complete the task within the stipulated time. Our primary interest is in assessing your planning process, problem-solving approach and your understanding of the Laravel framework and best practices. Not necessarily the end product. Once you've demonstrated a concept we'd prefer to see pseudo code for future occurrences if it helps you to show us more of your knowledge and approach within the time limit. We'd appreciate any notes on your planning, strategy or approach as well as any things you'd like to have done should more time have been made available. These can be submitted via a 'Notes.md' in the repo and we welcome these to be made and submitted outside of the time-constraint.
We will be looking to share the full code test repository with you at an allocated time and your time constraint will start from the end of that delivery call and time constraint judged based on the final commit.
The easiest way for all involved to review this test is via GitHub.
It would be best for us to review your submission as a PR so if you could push the base code up initially on the "main" branch and then start a new PR into your own repo for the actual task that would be most appreciated.
Once completed please provide access to @albanh, @alexbirtwell and @oddvalue. This can be done under Settings > Collaborators.