ZOOM+Care Candidate Code Challenge - Java Web Service
Welcome to the ZOOM+Care Java Web Service Candidate Code Challenge. If you are here you most likely have interest in joining the ZOOM+Care Software Engineering Team and asked to choose one of our software development challenges. If you came here on your own, you are welcome to explore the challenge and use it to sharpen your skills or prepare for future interviews.
The ZOOM+Care Candidate Code Challenges are intended to take between 1 and 2 hours to complete. This is not intended to be an extensive test of your programing skills or knowledge, but rather as a starting point for further conversations during the application process.
Instructions
This Candidate Code Challenge is geared specifically toward developers with java and web service experience. The objective of this challenge is to start with this very basic project, which includes a database with employee data, to expose the supplied data in web service endpoints.
The database is a relational database containing two tables, EMPLOYEE and PROPERTIES. The EMPLOYEE table is a simple mapping of an employee's id to their supervisor's id (or null if they have no supervisor). The PROPERTIES table contains a map of key/value pairs of properties for the employee.
The resulting services should allow users to get a list of all top-level employees or to specify an employee by id to return just that employee. The result for each employee, whether in the top level list or an individual, should include the employee's Id and all properties as well as a nested list of all direct reports for that employee. This applies any where in the structure an employee is displayed, creating a deeply nested structure of the organization.
The Basic Project
The project is built using Maven and the Spring-Boot framework. We encourage candidates to utilize the Spring and Spring-Boot frameworks to their advantage, but it is not required to use any specific frameworks. The base project includes an instance of the H2 database running embedded in the process and will start up a Tomcat java web container running on port 8080. Running the built in application is as easy as executing the following command in the root of the project.
./mvnw spring-boot:run
The application can also be run by executing the main method of the CandidateChallengeApplication class in the usual way that java applications are run (command line or in an IDE).
The embedded database is configured using the spring-boot defaults for JDBC and H2. The default database JDBC url is jdbc:h2:mem:testdb. This is the URL that is used for any JDBC connections and is automatically configured in the default spring-data-jdbc functionality. The H2 web console is also configured to be exposed at http://localhost:8080/h2-console when the application is running. Make sure you set the JDBC URL field to jdbc:h2:mem:testdb when connecting to the console to be able to access the database used for the code challenge.
For additional details and troubleshooting, the project includes spring actuator in the default path http://localhost:8080/actuator with all endpoints exposed and unsecure, including the detailed health endpoint at http://localhost:8080/actuator/health
Table Reference
EMPLOYEE An primary id for an employee and a reference to the employees supervisor.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
| ID | BIGINT(19) |
| SUPERVISOR_ID | BIGINT(19) |
PROPERTIES A map of key/value pairs of properties assigned to an employee.
| Column | Type |
|---|---|
| EMPLOYEE_ID | BIGINT(19) |
| KEY | VARCHAR(256) |
| VALUE | VARCHAR(256) |
Steps to Complete
- Create a Fork of the repository into your personal GitHub space.
- Implement the feature as described above.
- Create a Pull Request back to the original project.