Jack's Flight Club Technical Task

About

An application to store, retrieve, and query flight deals. Flight deals are sent to the application regularly by multiple website scrapers. These scrapers search Google flight, Skyscanner, Kayak etc.

Technologies

• Node.js
• Typescript
• Express
• Prisma
• Jest
• ESLint
• Prettier

Next steps

• Create endpoint needs protecting, will need to distribute authorisation keys to scrapers.
• Currency codes are not validated, using an invalid one will fail silently.
• A dedicated CSV parsing library should be used to replace the naive string splitting approach.

Dependencies

Requires latest version of Node.js.

Installation

Install dependencies

$ npm install

Create env file

Sign up to openexchangerates: https://openexchangerates.org/signup/free

Get your app id: https://openexchangerates.org/account/app-ids

Create a .env file with the app id in the OXR_APP_ID field. An example .env is provided at .env.example.

Generate Prisma client

$ npx prisma generate

Migrate database

$ npx prisma migrate dev

Usage

The following commands are available in package.json:

• start: starts the local dev server
• test: runs the tests
• format: formats the code base
• lint: lints the code base

For example: $ npm run start

API

create API

The create API is an endpoint that accepts and stores data from the scrapers. It accepts pricing data via http POST requests. The data should be provided as text/csv in the body of the HTTP POST request. The structure of the CSV data (The header row is optional):

URL,FlightCode,Origin,Destination,Date,Time,Duration,Cost,Currency
https://myflightwebsite.com/deal-1,IB1234,STN,MAD,2022-01-03,13:01,125,25,GBP

query API

The query API is an endpoint to retrieve the best prices for a particular route.

origin: string (XXX) (required)

The airport code for the route's origin.

destination: string (XXX) (required)

The airport code for the route's destination.

fromDate: string (YYYY-MM-DD)

When provided, will only include flights after and including this date.

toDate: string (YYYY-MM-DD)

When provided, will only include flights before and including this date.

fromTime: string (hh:mm)

When provided, will only include flights after this time of day.

toTime: string (hh:mm)

When provided, will only include flights before this time of day.

durationLessThan: integer

When provided, will only include flights whose duration in minutes is less than this.

Examples

• To query for flights between Cardiff and Heathrow:

  GET localhost:3000/api/query?origin=CAR&destination=LHR

• To query flights less than hour long in duration:

  GET localhost:3000/api/query?durationLessThan=60&origin=CAR&destination=LHR

• To query flights between a date range:

  GET localhost:3000/api/query?origin=CAR&destination=LHR&fromDate=2020-03-11&toDate=2023-05-01

• To query flights between a time range:

  GET localhost:3000/api/query?origin=CAR&destination=LHR&fromTime=11:30&toTime=14:32

• To insert rows into the database (with csv body, see above for format):

  POST localhost:3000/api/create