FlashCards

This application presents a series of flashcards to the user. Each flashcard has a question on one side, and the answer on the other, mirroring an IRL flash card. The flashcards are organized by topic, and are presented in a randomized, infinite list.

The application also provides a basic maintenance screen that allows you to add or remove flashcards.

For a quick walkthrough of the user experience, please see: https://youtu.be/77LLIT2ZOt8

Technologies used for this application:

• React
• .NET 8, Web API
• Entity Framework
• Cosmos DB
• Azure Container Apps
• Linux containers
• Docker
• GitHub Actions

Solution Architecture

• flashcard.ui:
  • React front-end
  • Deployed to Azure as an app container via a GitHub action
  • Uses the Flashcard API to get the list of topics and flashcards for a specific topic.
  • The only configuration is the base URL for the API, stored in an environmental variable called FLASHCARD_SERVICE_BASE_URL. Locally, this is configured via the .env file, but on Azure this is defined on the app container (under Application / Containers / Environmental variables).
• Flashcard
  • C#, Web API back-end
  • Deployed to Azure as an app container via a GitHub action
  • Connects to a Cosmos DB for NoSQL database
  • Configured with a combination of
    • appsettings.json file: The environment-specific settings in the former get updated by the GitHub action.
    • secrets manager: locally this is managed by Visual Studio. On Azure, this is defined in the app container under Settings / Secrets.
• DataImporter:
  • C# console app
  • This is not deployed to Azure.
  • This is designed to load up Cosmos DB with data from a flat file, data.json, that contains all of the question/answer pairs for one or more topics (a dummy version of this file is included with the project).
  • This requests two command line switches to be passed in:
    • CosmosDBSettings:PrimaryKey: The key to access Cosmos DB
    • PathToDataFile: the full path to the JSON data file to be loaded
  • Example execution: DataImporter.exe --CosmosDBSettings:PrimaryKey abc123 --PathToDataFile ./data.json
• FlashCard.Configuration
  • C# library
  • This is used by both FlashCard and DataImporter to read the appsettings file.
• UnitTests
  • C# library
  • This contains tests for DataImport, FlashCard, and FlashCard.Configuration