Maddie Shields - Edges - API Muncher

[madaleines]

API Muncher

Congratulations! You're submitting your assignment!

Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
How did you go about exploring the Edamam API, and how did you try querying the API?	I read the documentation for Edamam API to learn how to use it and then tested it in Postman before applying URL's in my wrapper.
What is an API Wrapper? Why is it in lib? How would your project change if you needed to interact with more than one API (aka more than just the Edamam API)?	I would change the params if I needed to use more than one API so it could call it once in the controller.
Describe your API wrapper, the methods you created in it, and why you decided to create those methods/how they were helpful	I have a search method which takes a query based on what the user is looking up, a show recipe method which takes a uri to return the recipe associated with that uri.
What was an edge case or failure case test you wrote for your API Wrapper? What was a nominal case?	If the recipe existed or did not for the show.
How does VCR aid in testing an API?	It allows me not to make repeated calls on the api so I can minimize the use for cost reasons.
What is the Heroku URL of your deployed application?	mads-muncher.herokuapp.com

[droberts-sea]

API Muncher

What We're Looking For

Feature	Feedback
Core Requirements
Git hygiene	yes
Comprehension questions	yes
General
Rails fundamentals (RESTful routing, use of named paths)	yes - good work, keeping the routing RESTful is hard on this project!
Semantic HTML	some - high level page structure (<header>, <footer>, <main>) is not clear
Errors are reported to the user	no - A search with no hits results in a blank page, and mangling the URI on the show page results in an exception rather than a polite error message. Getting a good handle on error handling is not just good for your users, it will also make your life easier as a developer.
API Wrapper to handle the API requests	yes - see inline comments
Controller testing	yes
Lib testing	yes
Search Functionality	yes
List Functionality	yes
Show individual item functionality	yes
Styling
List view shows 10 items at a time and/or has pagination	yes
Attractive and usable UI	no
API Features
The App attributes Edamam	no - This is really important! When you're designing code for money, using someone else's work without attribution is a good way to end up in legal trouble.
The VCR cassettes do not contain the API key	yes
External Resources
Link to deployed app on Heroku	Deployed, but can't search. Did you add your API keys as environment variables on Heroku?
Overall

Good work overall! The core functionality of this app works well, and it's clear to me that the learning goals of this assignment were met. Most of the things that aren't quite there (styling, deployment) feel to me like issues of not enough time rather than not understanding.

The one exception to this is error handling - make sure to pay close attention to this on future projects. Handling errors gracefully doesn't just help your users, it makes your life easier as well since you get clear info about why things aren't working. This will be especially important in JavaScript.

I've left a number of comments inline, but in general I am pretty happy with what I see here. Keep up the hard work!

[droberts-sea]

This is clever - I like the idea of not doing another search if the query is in the most recent results, and I'm glad that you figured out how to make it work if the query is not.

We could probably clean this up a little though:

  def self.show_recipe(uri)
    # Check the most recent search results
    @recipe_list.each do |recipe|
      if recipe.uri == uri
        return recipe
      end
    end

    # Didn't find it, so make a new query
    recipe_uri_list = []
    # copy-paste lines 35-38, then end the method
  end

[droberts-sea]

What happens if the API call didn't return any results?

[droberts-sea]

You shouldn't need to include this HTML boilerplate in your view templates, it should be handled by layouts/application.html.erb.

[droberts-sea]

I love that you're testing this error case, but I don't think your application actually handles this situation.

[droberts-sea]

What if the recipe ID is invalid?