sarathvad1811/js-contact-search-service

A Code Sample Option for JS Candidates.

Contact Search Service

A customer has asked you to implement an interface to let them search through contacts in their system. The problem is, their system is slow...super slow. And they want the search to be fast...super fast. Because of this, you'll need to cache any information you pull out of their system to be able to respond quickly to a search.

They would like to be able to type into a search bar a name (first, last, nickname), phone number, email, or role and get back a list of contacts. While the current system has all the information, searching is not supported and the response time does not meet the performance needs, so it is up to you to manage the data for searching. They have provided you access to their contact list through two entry points: the access layer service and the access layer update event emitter.

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Implement the contactService class with the following method:

• search(query: String): the method requested by the customer

Assume that someone else is working on the front end and that a backend service will use your new service to handle the API request when a search field is typed in on the website. There are already tests written for your service, but you can feel free to add your own. We encourage you to refactor your code and try to solve this problem in a way as close to how you would do it for an official product.

Note: the search function is written as a synchronous function to ensure you are fetching and caching the contacts. You must adhere to this contract in order to pass all of the tests.

Documentation

Access Layer Update Event Emitter

The access layer update event emitter (./accessLayer/updates.js, first argument to constructor) provides a way to subscribe to the various types of updates that come through your customer's system. It's important to make sure your version of the data is as up to date as possible. An emitted event can be one of the following:

• add: indicates a contact has been added to the system and provides the ID of the new contact.
• change: indicates a contact's info has been updated and provides the ID, field, and value of the changed contact.
• remove: indicates a contact has been removed from the system and provides the ID of the removed contact.

• A new contact will not emit any change events to indicate its initial values.

Event Emitter Object

The event emitter object provides a method for consuming data from events:

// this is written in typescript simply for type annotations
interface Emitter {
    on(event: String, listener: Function): Function
}
// example usage of similar interface in js
emitter.on('event', (value) => console.log(value));

The returned function when called unsubscribes the passed listener from the passed event.

Access Layer Service

The access layer service (./accessLayer/service.js, second argument to constructor) provides a single method that returns a contact by id. The service can take some time to respond so it returns a promise of a contact containing all of the relevant information stored under that ID (names, phone numbers, etc.).

The information coming from the service layer is not in the correct format requested by the customer and must be mapped to the desired structure:

{
    id: String
    role: String,
    name: String,
    email: String,
    phones: Array<String>,
    address: String,
}

The name string is formatted from the first name (or nick name if it exists) and last name. Phone numbers should be formatted as (xxx) xxx-xxxx regardless of how they are returned by the service layer.

Service Object

The service object provides a method for retrieving a contact's information asynchronously

// this is written in typescript simply for type annotations
interface Service {
    getById(id: String): Promise<Contact>
}
// example usage of similar interface in js:
service.getById('key').then(value => console.log(value));

The returned promise will resolve to the contact. You may assume that if you receive an ID from the emitter, it will return the corresponding contact.