Free Trial Email Verification Tool

Summary

Build a Free Trial sign-up process, but only allow users who have not previously registered on the site. This is a campaign for reaching new, previously unreached customers, and so, only users with email addresses that do not exist in our database of users may proceed beyond this step.

Deliverable

• Design

  • A single page app matching the Invision design as closely as possible
  • Provided image assets integrated into the design
  • Navigation and search bar
  • A secondary view that is displayed if the user email already exists in our system
  • A page redirect to the Pro Creative Market sign-up if the email does not exist in the system

• Form

  • An email input field (required) and button that submits an AJAX request to an API which checks whether or not the provided email exists in our database

• Database

  • A MySQL database of existing user emails

• Application

  • PSR-2 compliant code per the docs

Project Specifications

Backend

A fresh Laravel 5.8 installation houses the single API endpoint:

POST /api/verify

The endpoint performs simple validation to ensure we're dealing with a proper email, and then checks for its existence in the users table. The endpoint will return one of 3 responses:

{
	"status": 400,
	"message": "Invalid email address"
},
{
	"status": 422,
	"message": "Email address already exists"
},
{
	"status": 200,
	"message": "Success"
}

Frontend

There is a VerifyEmail VueJS component with an accompanying mixin that handles the form submission and page redirect on success.

The app uses Bootstrap 4 utility classes to style the component.

Database Schema

Data for this application is stored in one of the two base Laravel migration tables:

• users

  • id (bigInteger|unsigned|autoIncrement)
  • name (string)
  • email (string|unique)
  • email_verified_at (nullable)
  • password (string)
  • remember_token (string|nullable)
  • created_at (timestamp|nullable)
  • updated_at (timestamp|nullable)

• password_resets

  • email (string)
  • token (string)
  • created_at (timestamp|nullable)

A seeder was generated to get user data into the app for testing purposes. Since the only action performed against the database is a lookup on user emails, no other data structure was needed.

Testing

A single unit test ensures that the email validation in the controller is functioning as we expect.