/voting_api

Voting API

Description

Create an API using Rails which allows users to vote for candidates for public office.

Objectives

After completing this assignment, you should...

  • Understand how organizations present information via APIs.
  • Understand how APIs can be used to change data as well as view it.
  • Be able to write a versioned, nested API to share and allow edits to a database.
  • Be able to write Rails tests to cover a Rails API.
  • Be able to write a token-based authentication system for an API.

Deliverables

  • A Repository. Create your own repository for this assignment.
  • A Test Suite. Every action in your controllers should be tested.

Normal Mode

For this project, you will be building a Rails-based application which serves up only an API. This API will be responding with JSON. The API must have the following actions in the following locations:

  • /api/v1/candidates
    • Based on a candidates table, with at least name and party attributes
    • index action
    • show action
  • /api/v1/voters
    • Based on a voters table, with at least name and party attributes
    • create action
    • show action, with authentication to show that you are the voter
    • update action, with authentication to show that you are the voter
  • /api/v1/votes
    • Based on a votes table, with at least voter_id and candidate_id attributes
    • Each voter can cast at most one vote, period.
    • create action, with authentication to show that you are the voter
    • index action (which shows all candidates and a number of votes for each)

See the notes section below for links that will be helpful.

Hard Mode

Extend the application to allow for voters to vote multiple times (one for each race, e.g. Senate race). Add the following API actions:

  • /api/v1/race
    • Based on a races table, with at least a name attribute
    • index action
    • show action

Modify the candidates, voters, and votes models and controllers to allow:

  • candidates to belong to a race
  • votes belong to a candidate, a voter, and a race
  • votes to be unique for a voter and a race, not just one vote per voter
  • votes index page to show number of votes per candidate grouped by race.

Notes