Introduction

This is a software development exercise for a FirstBlood Technologies full stack developer position.

If you have not applied yet, apply through StackOverlow page. This exercise is open only for candidates who we have send an email to complete the exercise.

• See the open position description on StackOverflow

• Read more about our hiring process

• See stats of the previous hiring round

Exercise

Your task

Your task is to create a registration form for Angular 9 + NestJS application. We estimate this will take 3-4 hours for a person who is familiar with the technology stack. The application skeleton and instructions are well prepared, but expect extra 4-6 hours if you are not familiar with Angular, NestJS or TypeORM. The technology stack is the same that you will be using in when working us.

Task:

• Add a registration screen to an existing Angular application skeleton

  • The new registration screen is linked from the login screen
  • We need to input the following from the new users:
    • Email
    • Password
    • Display name
    • Phone number in an international plus prefixed format, like +1 555 1231234
  • Use your best practices and Clarity Design System examples to come up a basic non-ugly layout for this screen
  • The screen can sit in its own route

• Add a phone number to the existing dashboard screen, so that users can see their registered phone number

• Add server-side validation for the registration data

  • Validation must catch basic error cases
  • Saved phone numbers must be normalized by removing any spaces or dashes or other special characters users may use when entering a phone number - the string going to the database must look like +15551231234
  • The registration screen must be user friendly and correctly reflect any given input error back to the user, preferably to the related input field

• Add TypeORM migrations for all of the above

  • The phone number column does not yet exist in the database
  • Migration is applied on the existing database with existing user records, so you need to make a decision how to handle existing phone numberless user data

• Add end-to-end tests for the new registration functionality

  • Registration success and a user can log in
    • Note that there is an email verification mechanism present, you may shortcut this for this exercise and set all emails automatically confirmed
  • Cannot register the same email twice
  • Cannot register invalid password - must be at least 6 characters
  • Cannot register invalid phone number
  • Phone number is correctly normalized
  • The dashboard displays the registered phone number of the user

• Open a pull request which will be reviewed

  • Commentary contains screenshots of changed screens
  • Commentary contains instructions how to apply TypeORM migrations
  • Commentary contains instructions for an internal QA team (the exercise author, or me) how to manually test your pull request assuming they run the application locally on their computer

How to submit the exercise

• Create a private copy of this Github repository
• Complete the task above
• Create a new pull request against your private repository
• In the PR, write down number of hours you spent on this exercise (we do not use this to rank you, we use it to adjust the laborisity of future exercises)
• Invite a Github user miohtama to your repository
• Send email to [email protected] that you have completed the exercise

How your exercise submission will be ranked

We will look

• If the task was correctly completed
• Visual quality of the user interface changes - the layouts must look professional, not broken
• If the instructions were properly followed
• All tests pass and new functionality is covered by new E2E tests
• Code comment quality - if your code lacks helpful comments you will be negatively scored for it
• Pull request description quality - the pull request must look like a professional

Project description

The project contains

• frontend folder that includes Angular 9 application

• backend folder that includes NestJS application

• database contains docker files to ramp up the PostgreSQL instance needed for the exercise

Features

• ORM: TypeORM on PostgreSQL

• UI toolkit: Clarity Design System

• Authentication: JWT tokens based on NestJS tutorial

• User: Email and password flow with confirming the email address by a verification link

• Frontend logging: ngx-logger

• API documentation: Swagger

• Integration testing: Protractor

Installation

Prerequisites

• Linux or macOS

• Node v12 LTS

• Globally (npm install -g) installed ng and nest commands

• Docker

Setting up PostgreSQL database

This is will make a new PostgreSQL running in the standard port 5432. Please shutdown any previous conflicting PostgreSQL instances before starting this.

( cd database && docker-compose up -d )

Check the database is up

docker logs -f local_db

Check that you can log into a database with psql

docker exec -it local_db psql -U local_dev local_db

View tables

\dt

Creating the initial database

You need to have the backend installed

( cd backend && npm install )

Run initial migrations to set up initial database tables

( cd backend && npm run typeorm -- migration:run )

Create a user you can use for the initial login

( cd backend && node_modules/.bin/ts-node src/scripts/addUser.ts [email protected] --displayName=ImperatorFuriosa --password=admin )

Development

Running frontend

Frontend runs in port 4200.

First do NPM installation:

( cd frontend && npm install )

You can start the frontend as:

( cd frontend && ng serve )

The frontend will open without the backend being up, but as soon as you start working with you need to have the backend up'n'running, so please continue below.

Running backend

Backend runs in port 3000.

You can start the backend as:

( cd backend && npm run start:dev )

Backend is proxied to the frontend application in http://localhost:4200/api through Angular proxy configuration.

Swagger UI is available at http://localhost:3000/swagger/ to directly test API calls against the backend.

Running tests

Creating tests database

Only integration tests are supported. Backend is spun up on a special database. Frontend then exercises tests against this backend and database using Protractor. Protractor calls special API functions in testing module to fix backend state between tests.

Tests use their own database. To create it:

docker exec -it local_db psql -U local_dev -c "create database local_db_test" local_db

Note that in backend/config/ormConfig.ts the local_db_test database is configured to synchronize TypeORM migrations automatically, unlike the dvelopment database.

Running tests

To run tests - first spin up the backend:

( cd backend && NODE_ENV=testing npm run start:dev )

Then in another terminal you can run Protractor test:

( cd frontend && ng e2e )

Debugging tests

Angular end-to-end testing is in a bad shape. Currently Visual Studio Code debugger does not work directly with ng e2e.

To debug tests

• Turn on the debugger Auto Attach in Visual Studio Code through the command palette
• Start ng serve in one terminal to have Angular frontend running for Protractor
• In another terminal, run node --inspect-brk node_modules/.bin/protractor e2e/protractor.conf.js and now Visual Studio Code will stop in breakpoints set in the test files
• You can use Web Console Inspector in Protractor's Chrome instance to figure out the state of the forms and buttons for the e2e tests

What does not work

• node --inspect-brk node_modules/.bin/ng: For some reason breakpoints get ignored if ng e2e is run directly
• Running Protractor without starting a frontend manually: ng e2e is responsible for doing Angular setup

Migrations

Run typeorm CLI in backend folder.

Automatically generating migrations

You can generate migration files

1. Update entity source code in backend

2. You have an up-to-date local development database

# Creates a file under src/migrations/
npm run typeorm -- migration:generate -n CreateUsers

Apply migrations against the local database

npm run typeorm -- migration:run

Check the result of migrations using psql command-line tool:

docker exec -it local_db psql -U local_dev local_db

\d 'user'

Further reading

NestJS and TypeORM migration example

NestJS and TypeORM in 30 minutes

Another NestJS and TypeORM tutorial

PostgreSQL on Dockerhub

class-validator

Cats NestJS + Swagger sample full example code

Testing database interaction with TypeORM and related source code

Artwork

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash.