BracketBros

⚡ Quick start

When starting the server you will be sent to the post view, where there is a chronological feed with forum posts. You can then browse posts, see comments by going to each post, or search for specific posts.

To interact with the site, you need to register a user. Register a username, email, and password. The password must consist of at least 8 characters, one alphanumeric character, one lowercase, and one uppercase letter.

You can also log into the account "Hackerman" with the password "Password123!"

When you have logged in you can create/edit posts, comment, and like posts. You get a dashboard with an overview of your posts, comments, and likes. In the upper right corner, you have your profile panel. Here you can change your username, upload a profile picture, change mail/password, enable 2FA, and download all your user data. You can delete your user and data under "personal data". Then all your posts and comments will be marked as posted by Anonymous.

Admin functionality

For admin privileges, you can log in with user «torkratte» and password «Password123!».

We have an admin role that has access to an admin dashboard. Here the user can edit, delete, or add new categories and tags. They can change the color, name, and picture. An admin can also delete all posts and comments, while a regular user can only delete its own content.

📝 Functionality

This forum website allows users to browse posts and comment. Both in a feed, by searching, or by using categories and tags. The feed can be sorted after different criteria. The user can register an account to create posts, comment on other posts, and like posts. When the user is logged in it gets a dashboard view with an overview of the user's posts, comments, and likes. We have admin users with extra functionality. They have their own admin dashboard where they can change categories and tags. There is a user dashboard where users can change their information and upload a custom profile picture.

🔨 Project architecture

Architectural layers

Layer	Description
Areas	This layer contains the user account management functionality (auto-generated from the 'Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.UI' package).
Controllers	This layer contains the controllers that handle HTTP requests. When a user requests a page, the corresponding controller is responsible for returning the appropriate response. For example, the ForumController is responsible for handling requests to forum pages.
Models	This layer contains the models that represent the data in the application. For example, the Forum model represents a forum and the Post model represents a post in a forum.
Views	This layer contains the Razor Pages used to render the user interface. When a controller needs to render a page, it passes the appropriate model to the view. The view then uses the model to generate the HTML output for the page.
DAL	Data Access Layer - This layer contains the code that interacts with the database. This code is responsible for performing CRUD operations on the data in the database.
ViewModel	This layer contains the classes that represent the data that is passed to the views. The ViewModels are used to simplify the code in the views and make them more reusable

Static resources

Component	Description
wwwroot	This houses the static files that are served to the client, such as CSS and JavaScript files. These files are served directly to the client without any processing by the ASP.NET Core application.

Supporting components

Component	Description
Migrations	Contains the changes to our database schema. These are auto-generated. They allow us to version our database schema in a way that corresponds with the changes in our codebase.
Logs	Contains error and information logging for debugging and error handling.

Diagrams

Diagram of the application architecture

Entity Relationship diagram of the database

⌨️ Code

We have tried to follow the C# coding convention for syntax and naming conventions to make sure the code is readable and manageable. However, we haven't focused much on this, so the code might sometimes break conventions.

The code is documented with comments throughout the project. The code should either be self-explanatory or explained with comments. We have also provided comments with links where we have found inspiration or code from the internet.

Packages

These are the packages that we have imported to our project and a description of what they do.

Package	Description
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.EntityFrameworkCore	Provides classes and interfaces that are used to implement user authentication and authorization in ASP.NET Core applications.
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.UI	Provides Razor Pages and components that are used to implement common user account management tasks, such as login, registration, and password reset.
Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.CodeGeneration.Design	Provides classes and interfaces that are used to generate code for ASP.NET Core applications. Used for scaffolding to generate code for adding authentication.
Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Design	Provides classes and interfaces that are used to design and manage Entity Framework Core models.
Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Proxies	Provides classes and interfaces that are used to implement lazy loading.
Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite	Provides classes and interfaces that are used to interact with SQLite databases.
Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer	Provides classes and interfaces that are used to interact with SQL Server databases.
Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools	Provides tools that can be used to manage Entity Framework Core models and databases.
Serilog.Extensions.Logging.File	Provides classes and interfaces that are used to log to files.
Jdenticon.AspNetCore	Provides auto-generation of avatars for users who don't have a profile picture. This generates a unique picture based on the username.
Markdig	This import provides markdown support for writing posts.
HtmlSanitizer	This import is used to sanitize HTML when writing in Markdown. This is to provide just basic Markdown support and to not open up for potential injections or malicious code.