DevTrack — Engineering Issue Tracker API

A minimal Django REST backend for tracking engineering bugs and tasks.
Data is persisted in flat JSON files (reporters.json, issues.json).

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How to Run

# 1. Clone the repo
git clone <your-repo-url>
cd devtrack

# 2. Install dependencies
pip install django

# 3. Reset data files (first time)
echo "[]" > reporters.json
echo "[]" > issues.json

# 4. Start the server
python manage.py runserver

Server runs at http://127.0.0.1:8000

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Endpoints

Reporter Endpoints

Method	URL	Description
POST	/api/reporters/	Create a new reporter
GET	/api/reporters/	Get all reporters
GET	/api/reporters/?id=1	Get a single reporter by ID

POST /api/reporters/ — example body

{
  "id": 1,
  "name": "Thahaseen",
  "email": "tasee@example.com",
  "team": "backend"
}

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Issue Endpoints

Method	URL	Description
POST	/api/issues/	Create a new issue
GET	/api/issues/	Get all issues
GET	/api/issues/?id=1	Get a single issue by ID
GET	/api/issues/?status=open	Filter issues by status

POST /api/issues/ — example body

{
  "id": 1,
  "title": "Login button not working on mobile",
  "description": "Users on iOS 17 cannot tap the login button",
  "status": "open",
  "priority": "critical",
  "reporter_id": 1
}

201 Created response (critical priority)

{
  "id": 1,
  "title": "Login button not working on mobile",
  "description": "Users on iOS 17 cannot tap the login button",
  "status": "open",
  "priority": "critical",
  "reporter_id": 1,
  "created_at": "2026-05-23 10:00:00.000000",
  "message": "[URGENT] Login button not working on mobile — needs immediate attention"
}

400 Bad Request (validation failure)

{ "error": "Title cannot be empty" }

404 Not Found

{ "error": "Issue not found" }

Valid values:

• status: open, in_progress, resolved, closed
• priority: low, medium, high, critical

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Design Decision

Why flat JSON files instead of SQLite/a real DB?

The brief required storing data without running Django migrations or setting up models as database tables. Using reporters.json and issues.json keeps the project dependency-free (no db.sqlite3 setup needed), makes the stored data human-readable and easy to inspect during development, and lets the OOP classes in models.py stay pure Python — they are not Django ORM models. The trade-off is no concurrent-write safety, but that's acceptable for a learning project of this scope.

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OOP Design

• BaseEntity (abstract) — defines validate() and to_dict()
• Reporter(BaseEntity) — validates name, email, team
• Issue(BaseEntity) — validates title, status, priority; has describe()
• CriticalIssue(Issue) — overrides describe() with [URGENT] prefix
• LowPriorityIssue(Issue) — overrides describe() with low-priority note