REX Backend Test

Overview

The Good Forum (tm) is an API application built based on Laravel 5.6. We would like you to help improve this application by completing the task outlined below.

This API will be utilised by a React frontend.

Test Guidelines

• We suggest you spend no more than a few hours on the test.
• Make sure to document your progress and decision making in this file
• Once you've completed you work, please let us know so we can review.

Problem

We need to be able to sync messages in from an external sources. To demonstrate this issue the composer dev-setup command has seeded two sqlite databases.

• database.sqlite is the api database
• database_external.sqlite represents an external data source that we do not control

We anticipate that there will soon be many data sources for messages coming in and need a solution to keep our api database up to date.

Task

Create a new module to handle syncing data in from the database_external.sqlite database and ensuring that database.sqlite contains everything.

We need a service that runs and scans the external database (use the laravel connection but don't use eloquent for the external data since in a real situation the data would likely be from a rest api) and copies data back into the main database.

Considerations

• What is the fastest way to stay sync?
• How will the database stay up to date?
• Will this scale to millions of records?
• How do we know it is correct?

Installation

Requirements

• PHP 7.0 (with sqlite)

Configure

# install dependencies
composer install

# setup for local dev
#  - copies .env
#  - generates app key
#  - prepares database
composer dev-setup

Run tests

composer tests

Run application

php artisan serve

Application available from: http://localhost/

Access the API

The API is RESTful:

Sections

Sections contain topics. Each section breaks the forum up into logically grouped areas. Eg. the "Crypto" section.

• List of sections: GET /api/v1/sections
• Retrieve section: GET /api/v1/sections/{id}
• Create a new section: POST /api/v1/sections
• Update a section: PATCH /api/v1/sections/{id}
• Delete a section: DELETE /api/v1/sections/{id}

Topics

Topics group together messages within a section. An example topic in the "Crypto" section might be "I just mortgaged my house and now BTC is only worth 3k 😱".

• List of topics: GET /api/v1/topics
• Retrieve topic: GET /api/v1/topics/{id}
• Create a new topic: POST /api/v1/topics
• Update a topic: PATCH /api/v1/topics/{id}
• Delete a topic: DELETE /api/v1/topics/{id}
• Get topic thread: GET /api/v1/topics/{id}/thread

Messages

Messages are created within a topic and may have a parent_id for nested relationships.

• List of messages: GET /api/v1/messages
• Retrieve message: GET /api/v1/messages/{id}
• Create a new message: POST /api/v1/messages
• Update a message: PATCH /api/v1/messages/{id}
• Delete a message: DELETE /api/v1/messages/{id}

Users

Users are the entities within the system that can create messages, and topics.

• List of users: GET /api/v1/users
• Retrieve user: GET /api/v1/users/{id}
• Create/register a new user: POST /api/v1/users
• Update a user: PATCH /api/v1/users/{id}
• Delete a user: DELETE /api/v1/users/{id}
• Retrieve user profile: GET /api/v1/users/{id}/profile
• Update user profile: PATCH /api/v1/users/{id}/profile