elderyouth/iacodingchallenge

iA Coding Challenge

By Adrian Salazar

Introduction

This program is designed to accept a location as a pair of coordinates adjusted by the input fields below. After pressing the button, the program will return a list of the three closest central fill facilities from a random seed, along with the cheapest medication price for each central fill.

It was implemented using Blazor Server App on C# in order to provide a more 'realistic' look at how this program would be used on a web application or website. The Facility List component should have the ability to dynamically re-render upon clicking the button at the main body.

Assumptions

The following are some assumptions made:

• All Facilities and Medications each have unique key values
• Edge cases for input coordinates exceeding are handled in the front end
• FacilityRepository is set to retrieve both 'as-is' Facility entries and top 3 items with an ordered list of medications
• Some data constraints for each Model are handled with data annotations like [Range]
• Cases where Manhattan Distance is the same between two central fills, then the order will be determined by the ID this could be modified to be based on Medication instead

Possible Changes

Because this is a program operating with a in-memory database, I would modify the program to include an actual connection string to a database to simulate a more realistic scenario since in-memory would not be something feasible or secure to work with. Another major change would be in the way the repository pattern is used - at the moment, I am injecting FacilityRepository, Ideally I would take advantage of the Controller I created and use a Service pattern instead to keep the fetching data better structured and be able to take the advantage of a proper API call to avoid overwhelming the DB with direct calls.

For cases where the code would be used on a higher traffic, I would optimize ways to access the data by creating stored procedures inside the database, setup more security procedures for retrieving data. And as mentioned before, using a proper API endpoint would ease network traffic and allow more flexibility to the request (what if we want to look at all medications? )

Caveats

• Random seed generation wasn't added due to time limitations
• There are no 'duplicate' Medications (eg. if two instances of MedicationId = 2 exist, DbContext will immediately throw an error). Did not have time to setup a stronger relational database for a one to many relation
• In-memory database is a JSON file instead of a proper DB
• Collision detection isn't 100% implemented, when calling methods from the FacilityRepository will throw an error if things from data annotations are violated but not all cases are handled
• Did not contain the Facility List as its own Razor component
• Missed on creating a test case project due to time

Setup

• Open the .sln file using Visual Studio 2019 or above
• Build and Run the site/server with the 'build' button, no other requirements needed
• To use a different data set, I recommend https://json-generator.com/ and use the following snippet to generate a random amount of facilities and medications on each:

[
  '{{repeat(7, 10)}}',
  {
    facilityId: '{{integer(1, 999)}}',
    facilityCoordinateX: '{{integer(-10, 10)}}',
	facilityCoordinateY: '{{integer(-10, 10)}}',
    medications: [
      '{{repeat(1,10)}}',
      {
        medicationId: '{{index()}}{{integer(0, 10)}}',
        medicationPrice: '{{floating(0.01, 999)}}'
      }
    ]
  }
]

Troubleshooting

• If the program does not open for you, ensure the following NuGet packages are included: -- Microsoft.MicrosoftEntityCore -- Microsoft.MicrosoftEntityCore.InMemory -- Newtonsoft.Json