/placements-io-coding-challenge

Primary LanguageScala

Placements.io Coding Challenge

Running the application

Note: This project is setup to run with Docker. Having Docker installed will make running the app and tests much more simple. Please see About Docker CE for information regarding installation or upgrading.

Starting

  1. Run the following from within the top level directory: docker-compose up
  2. Visit the running application in your browser at localhost:9000/invoice.
  3. The application starts with an empty database. To populate it, click on the import button and select the sample file under the /data directory.

Stopping / cleaning up

  1. Press Ctrl-C to stop running containers.
  2. Run docker-compose down -v to clean up any leftovers.

Running tests

  1. Run the following from within the top level directory: $ docker-compose -f test.docker-compose.yml up
  2. This will execute sbt test within a fresh docker container, so it may take a little while as dependencies are downloaded and the project is compiled.

Already have sbt installed?

You can avoid using Docker and execute sbt run. Be sure to update conf/application.conf with appropriate database configs.

Chosen features

As the request was to spend only a few hours on the challenge, I chose features that I felt comfortable implementing such that I could complete them in the time frame.

I chose to implement this project with the Play Framework in Scala for it is a framework I just recently learned, but had yet to try it on any particular topic. Normally for a project like this, I would create a separate UI or Single Page Application in jQuery or AngularJS with a RESTful service backing it; however, I felt that writing two applications would not be a good use of time.

In the end, the features I finally implemented could have all existed in just a SPA with no backing service, but I had anticipated potentially getting to multi-user features, which would require a centralized data source.

Features

  • The user should be able to browse through the line-item data
    • implemented via pagination
    • pagination logic
    • pagination view
    • there is an outstanding bug with pagination and small sets of data (i.e. filtered). This unit test currently fails, but demonstrates the issue. With more time, I would have liked to have fixed it.
  • The user should be able to see each line-items billable amount
  • The user should be able to see the invoice grand-total
  • The user should be able to sort the data
  • The user should be able to output the invoice to *.CSV, *.XLS, etc.
    • controller logic
    • Implemented CSV export within the controller. With more time, would have liked to have extracted it into its own service.
    • Normally, I would have used an existing library to implement CSV generation. However, I also felt that learning such a library would have taken more time than just creating something simple and untested (for the sake of this project).
  • The user should be able to filter the data
    • Affects grand-total and export results

Additional features

In addition to the features listed in the challenge prompt, I implemented a couple others that I felt could potentially add to the usability of the application

  • File import
    • Allows import of the provided sample data, or any other data that matches its shape.
    • Only inserts records with new IDs
    • Does not perform any friendly content validation
  • Column details on hover
    • Some of the cells contain large amounts of information, but my display is kinda small.
    • So I thought I'd try an idea to have an entire column grow when the mouse hovers.
    • In the end, I'm not a fan of the affect; particularly with how everything seems to jump around. However, I decided to leave it in for now to see what others thought or how they reacted.