Backend Tasks

Two tasks were undertaken in this project:

Database optimization: Documentation for the proposed database optimization strategy can be found here: OPTIMIZATION.md
RESTful API Development: The documentation of the API is detailed below.

RESTful API

API endpoints were designed for three use cases:

User authentication
Course enrollment
User information retrieval

Express, a JavaScript web framework, was used with the Node.js (v20.8.1) runtime environment to develop and test the endpoints. The data used/generated is not persisted in any database or json file as it is arbitrary, and is used for quick prototyping. See here

User Authentication

POST /api/users

The endpoint validates a user through the email and password in the request body sent as JSON:

{"email": "useremail@email", "password": "testpass"}

Expected response

If a user is not found, a 404 status code is returned with a JSON message:

{"message": "Not found"}

If a user is found, but a wrong password is given, a 400 status code is returned with a JSON:

{"message": "Wrong password"}

if a user is found, and the password is validated, a 200 status code is returned with a JSON which contains the id of the user.

{"id":"userId", "message":"authenticated"}

Course Enrollment

POST /api/users/:user_id/courses/:course_id

The endpoint registers a course to a user by linking the user_id and course_id in a defined usersCourses array. See here

Expected response

{
  "message":"enrollment successful",
  "courseId":"course_id",
  "userId":"user_id",
  "courseName":"name of course",
  "coursePrice":1000 // An example price
}

User information retrieval

GET /api/users/:user_id

If a user is not found, a 404 status code is returned with a JSON message:

{"message": "Not found"}

if a user with the user_id exists, the user data is returned without the password field:

{
  "id":3,
  "email":"userthree@email",
  "name":"Precious Alle"
}

Usage

To run this application, simply clone the repository

$ git clone https://github.com/Taiwopeter-babs/techprosng-backend-task.git

Install packages

$ npm install

Run server

$ npm run start

On another terminal

Course enrollment

$ curl -XPOST localhost:3000/api/users/4/courses/3; echo ""

{"message":"enrollment successful","courseId":3,"userId":4,"courseName":"cloud and devops engineering","coursePrice":1000}

User information retrieval

$ curl -XGET localhost:3000/api/users/3; echo ""

{"id":3,"email":"userthree@email","name":"Precious Alle"}

User authentication

$ curl -XPOST -d '{"email": "userone@email", "password": "password1"}' -H 'content-type: application/json' localhost:3000/api/users; echo ""

{"id":1,"message":"authenticated"}

Note

node.js runtime version - v20.8.1 was used for development