othmanus/mailbox-api

Mailbox API

Description

A local firm is building a small E-mail client to manage their internal messaging. You have been asked to provide a simple prototype for a basic mailbox API in which the provided messages are listed. Each message can be marked as read and you can archive single messages.

Solution

Used technology

I choosed Laravel framework for this task, because of its simplicity and its powerful RESTful API handler.

Installation

To install the app, first clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/othmanus/mailbox-api.git

And then update with composer

composer update

Import messages from a JSON file

First, you need to create the table and change the configurations in .env file at the root of the project.

Then, go to the command line and type the following command:

php artisan migrate --seed

The command will create the messages table and import the json file to seed it.

The messages contains the following attributes:

- id: integer // primary key
- sender: string
- subject: string
- message: string
- time_sent: datetime
- is_read: boolean // false by default
- time_read: datetime // read timestamp
- is_archived: boolean // false by default
- time_archived: datetime // archived timestamp

The creation of the table is defined in ./database/migrations/##_create_messages_table.php

To import the json file, I first pasted a copy of it in ./storage/app/messages_sample.json And then, I created a Seeder (./database/seeds/MessagesTableSeeder.php), in which we read the json file and import the content into the database.

To run the app, use the following command:

php artisan serve

It should be running on http://localhost:8000

### Message API Using the ./app/Message.php model, which contains all the previous attributes, we can interact easly with the database.

All the routes are listed in ./routes/api.php which is protected by a middleware by default. The routes are:

- /api/messages : list of all messages
- /api/messages/archived : list of all archived messages
- /api/messages/{id} : show a message
- /api/messages/{id}/read : read a message
- /api/messages/{id}/archive : archive a message

All the actions are routed to the controller ./app/Http/Controllers/Api/MessagesController.php.