BooksCat

Description

This is a proof of concept web app for managing books in a library.
It would be improved by implementing some interesting features in the nearest future (search by title, category, author or by ISBN).

The project consists of two main parts:

• Backend: Elixir/Phoenix API + PostgreSQL
• Frontend: Svelte

A simple Books REST API with database persistence using PostgreSQL.
The requirements are to have a single endpoint on /api/books that allows CRUD operations over the books resource with the following fields:

• id - This is the table Primary Key (UUID type)
• title - String containing the book title
• authors - String containing a comma-separated list of authors
• isbn - Book ISBN
• description - Text specifying the book description or abstract
• category - String containing a comma-separated list of tags
• cover - String containing an image url for displaying the cover
• inserted_at - Datetime defining when the record was created
• updated_at - Datetime defining when the record was updated

The endpoints for the Books resource are listed here:

To create a book you need to complete a post request with the following parameters:

Installation

Prerequisites

While developing the following stack was used:

Technology	Version
Elixir	1.12.2-otp-24
Phoenix	1.6.2
Node JS	14.15.4
PostgreSQL	14.1
docker-compose	1.26.0
Svelte	3.0.0
Rollup JS	2.3.4

Steps to start the project locally:

1. Execute mix deps.get to install Phoenix dependencies.
2. You need a postgresql database to proceed.
   You can use docker: docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up -d to get up the database.
   If this command fails then you're using PostgreSQL locally. Stop it: sudo service postgresql stop and repeat docker-compose command.
3. When the database is up and running:
   • mix ecto.create and then
   • mix ecto.migrate
4. Start Phoenix: mix phx.server
5. Now we need to launch frontend. Enter /assets directory from another tab of your terminal and run: npm i or yarn if you prefer it over npm.
6. Execute npm run dev and navigate to http://localhost:5000

At beginning there's no book data. You can use some mock data from /assets/src/mockups/booksMock file and use Postman for testing

Testing

Run mix test for API tests

You could also visit endpoint in the browser http://localhost:4000/api/books and investigate api responses.

The BooksCat now looks like this, but there are a lot of ideas worth mentioning

Ideas / Improvements

With the next iterations I'd like to add:

• The most important feature searcher with filters
• Authorization/authentication for backend (different roles for DB) and frontend (sign in new users, user roles).
• Add more fields for Book Entity like 'pages', 'subtitle', 'publisher'.
• More validation cases (pop up for errores, etc.)
• More tests
• Extra integration -> add bar code ISBN scanner for faster adding new books to the library.