Customer Management Rest API

Introduction

These were specifications made by Webtrekk as a developer challenge.

Webtrekk specifications

• Overview page:
  • Lists all customers
  • Add a new customer
  • Link to edit a customer (‘Customer Detail’ page)
  • Delete a customer
• Customer Detail page:
  • Edit & remove profile data
• Tech specifications
  • Setup a node server
  • Use persistent data storage (MongoDB, ...)

Comment

There are some additional functionalities I set up, which I thought could be useful:

• Articles: I thought customers need articles. All CRUD operations work on articles as well.
• User accounts: So every user account can add customers to the storage.
• Admin label: To set up articles an admin account is needed.
• JSON web token: To deal with sessions I set up JSON web tokens.
• Orders: Customers have an order attribute which is linked to articles. Like this it should be a fully functional customer management backend for a small application.

Tech stack

• Node.js with Express.js
• MongoDB with Mongoose
• OpenSSL
• User Authentication with Passport.js
• JSON Web Tokens

Setting up the project

• add a config.js file with the following variables:
  • 'mongoUrl' with the path to your mongoDB
  • 'port' and 'secPort' for HTTPS support
  • 'secretOrKey' to sign the JSON Web Tokens
• add cert.csr, certificate.pem and private.key files with OpenSSL in the bin folder

Discussion:

There is one inconsistency in the API's responses. Most of the time the server sends back the manipulated document just not in case of a removal. In this case the client will just receive a success message. It wouldn't make sense to send any other data with a delete operation, but this inconsistency needs to be addressed!