Chitter Challenge

Feel free to use Google, your notes, books, etc. but work on your own
If you refer to the solution of another coach or student, please put a link to that in your README
If you have a partial solution, still check in a partial solution
You must submit a pull request to this repo with your code by 9am Monday morning

Challenge:

As usual please start by forking this repo.

We are going to write a small Twitter clone that will allow the users to post messages to a public stream.

Features:

STRAIGHT UP

As a Maker
So that I can let people know what I am doing
I want to post a message (peep) to chitter

As a maker
So that I can see what others are saying
I want to see all peeps in reverse chronological order

As a Maker
So that I can better appreciate the context of a peep
I want to see the time at which it was made

As a Maker
So that I can post messages on Chitter as me
I want to sign up for Chitter

HARDER

As a Maker
So that only I can post messages on Chitter as me
I want to log in to Chitter

As a Maker
So that I can avoid others posting messages on Chitter as me
I want to log out of Chitter

ADVANCED

As a Maker
So that I can stay constantly tapped in to the shouty box of Chitter
I want to receive an email if I am tagged in a Peep

Technical Approach:

In this unit, you integrated a database into Bookmark Manager using the PG gem and SQL queries. You can continue to use this approach when building Chitter Challenge.

If you'd like more technical challenge now, try using an Object Relational Mapper as the database interface.

Some useful resources: Ruby Object Mapper

ActiveRecord

Notes on functionality:

You don't have to be logged in to see the peeps.
Makers sign up to chitter with their email, password, name and a username (e.g. samm@makersacademy.com, password123, Sam Morgan, sjmog).
The username and email are unique.
Peeps (posts to chitter) have the name of the maker and their user handle.
Your README should indicate the technologies used, and give instructions on how to install and run the tests.

Bonus:

If you have time you can implement the following:

In order to start a conversation as a maker I want to reply to a peep from another maker.

And/Or:

Work on the CSS to make it look good.

Good luck and let the chitter begin!

Code Review

In code review we'll be hoping to see:

All tests passing
High Test coverage (>95% is good)
The code is elegant: every class has a clear responsibility, methods are short etc.

Reviewers will potentially be using this code review rubric. Referring to this rubric in advance may make the challenge somewhat easier. You should be the judge of how much challenge you want at this moment.

Automated Tests:

Opening a pull request against this repository will will trigger Travis CI to perform a build of your application and run your full suite of RSpec tests. If any of your tests rely on a connection with your database - and they should - this is likely to cause a problem. The build of your application created by has no connection to the local database you will have created on your machine, so when your tests try to interact with it they'll be unable to do so and will fail.

If you want a green tick against your pull request you'll need to configure Travis' build process by adding the necessary steps for creating your database to the .travis.yml file.

Notes on test coverage

Please ensure you have the following AT THE TOP of your spec_helper.rb in order to have test coverage stats generated on your pull request:

require 'simplecov'
require 'simplecov-console'

SimpleCov.formatter = SimpleCov::Formatter::MultiFormatter.new([
  SimpleCov::Formatter::Console,
  # Want a nice code coverage website? Uncomment this next line!
  # SimpleCov::Formatter::HTMLFormatter
])
SimpleCov.start

You can see your test coverage when you run your tests. If you want this in a graphical form, uncomment the HTMLFormatter line and see what happens!

THOUGHT PROCESS

this week about Databases has been very challenging for me, so I do baby steps a bit like the Bookmark_Manager challenge (https://github.com/s-dousse/bookmark_manager2) let's see how far I can go...

specifications

create Peep (message)
see Peeps in revers chronological order (newest first)
see the time a Peep was created
sign up for Chitter
(extra I : - log in to Chitter - log out of Chitter)
(extra II: - receive email notification when tagged in a Peep)

Domain Model

setting up the database

Travis CI for automated test for future pull request

connect to sql
create a db called chitter_challenge
connect to the db
refer to 01_create_peep_table.sql and run query

! I am unsure on how to use a 'time' category for the data entry corresponding to the date of creation of the Peep. Now that I think of it maybe I can use the id? as it is unique and sort it in a descending order ... ! just looked at how to store time with PostgreSQL, I might have to use the timestamp when I create a post and store some time data as a create_at attribute of Peep instances , or similar?

first feature : create a peep

As a Maker
So that I can let people know what I am doing
I want to post a message (peep) to chitter

write failing feature test
update Controller and Views
Rspec configure : connection to test db (truncate db)
TDD update the Model + select the right db depending it we are testing or not

extracting database setup object

I haven't done this for my bookmark_manager project, so I will try do it for the chitter app as it's better (SRP, TDD) I believe this will help me as you could see from previous commits, I didn't connect properly to the right database when testing, as I didn't use TDD when I set it up...

our sinatra app can read/ write from the database (MVC structure + test and development environements)
Peep class is responsible for connecting to the db on top of manipulating date in that db. this means we create a new connection using PG.connect each time we want to 'talk' to the db
we get a visual confirmation we used the right database when running tests by checking TablePlus, but it would be better to write some test for this.

=> let's extract an object which we will use to: - set up a connection to the db - separate application behaviour from database behaviour - wrap an adaptor object

Extract the db logic to an object (DatabaseConnection class)
use our new class to set up a connection (test or dev environment)

feature 2 : see peeps in reverse order

As a maker
So that I can see what others are saying
I want to see all peeps in reverse chronological order

For this will will try to tweak my .all method to reverse the order using the id Primary Key of the peeps table

use : SQL ORDER BY keyword SELECT column1, column2, ... FROM table_name ORDER BY column1, column2, ... ASC|DESC;

! Wooopsy something weird happend: I don't know how I did this but after changing the SQL query, I couldn't run my local server anymore. It looked my ruby version was 3.0.0 though I did specify 3.0.2 in my Gemfile (I set it up at the beginning + bundle install so all my gem are on the right version) and until now all worked fine. no idea what happened.

to fix it : update rvm remove ruby-3.0.0 set ruby-3.0.2 as default (though it showed it as the current version already) bundle install looks like it worked but I don't know why it switched to an older version of ruby in the middle of the project

NOTE: I haven't wrote a test to check the order is reversed but I can see it worked on my webpage: the last Peep create (ex 7th peep) shows up at the top of the list though the first {eep created shows up at the bottom of the list.

Feature 3 : see time of creation of a Peep

As a Maker
So that I can better appreciate the context of a peep
I want to see the time at which it was made

I will need a new attribute for the peep : created_at

I did't have attribute for my Bookmark_manager I did something different but it would be good to update my Peep class to return Peep instances : Pee instance will have 3 parameter: the id , a content and a date of creation (created_at)

had quite a hard time with this one :

I didn't realised the that self.all woudl return just a array the result of my query and that I had to 'sort' it into a Peep instance myself this was because before I wrote:

class Peep
  def self.all
    rs = DatabaseConnection.query("SELECT * FROM peeps ORDER BY id DESC;")

    rs.map { |peep| peep['content'] }
  end
end

so when I saw peep I thought it was Peep though I hadn't wrap the result from my query into a Object yet, though I had done it for the self.create just before...

I set up the database to get the time of creation of an entry automatically when we enter the data into the table. but I had a hard time formatting it when retrieving the data from the column created_at to add it to my Peep instance it was already a string which I couldn't format with .strftime(" created at %I:%M%p") so I used Time.parse before turning it into a formatted string. it is now very elegant so I will come back to it... error message:
testing TIME in peep_spec.rb there is problem with my query when I try to get some persistent data for the test

peep = Peep.create(content: "One last peep")
persisted_data = DatabaseConnection.setup('chitter_app_test').query("SELECT * FROM peeps WHERE created_at = #{peep.created_at};")

error message:

As I have set up the database to create a timestamp for each entry I don't know how to test it, I don't need to freeze time nor have some persistent_data method I can see on TablePlus that the created_at attribute doesn't change and when I test it on the website the time of the peeps is accurate

future steps

create separate database to store users login info (ask to re-enter password to check if it's the same)
create log_in where we compare the given params to the one in our database
log_out function
add attribute to Peep to have a author attribute (set up as default to anonymous but if the user logged in it would have his/her username)

Would have love to have more time to finish the challenge

s-dousse/chitter-challenge