A simple quiz application where users can create questionnaires with questions. The user can then share the questionnaire to public after which they can look at the responses.
- User registers and logs in to the application.
- User can then create, edit or delete questionnaires with questions.
- User can choose questions to be either one of the following: Short answer, Paragraph, Checkboxes, Multiple choices or Dropdown.
- User can create a public sharable link for the questionnaire.
- Public can fetch the questionnaire via the shared link and provide answers to the questions.
- User can then view the answers for the shared questionnaire submitted by the public.
My idea was to implement the project in a way where you could ask any general questions or like a survey. Looked at the designs and initially assumed that login was not required to create a questionnaire. I wanted to approach in a different direction where users have to be registered with the application in order to create questionnaires. In this way they will have the ability to view the responses for the questionnaires when they share to the public. I left the option for users to provide answers to the questionnaire without a login. The only information we ask from the user is their email address.
Before starting on this project you should have:
- Open up a terminal, navigate to the directory containing this README.md.
- Run the following commands in order
# load start the container
./dc start
# to generate migrations and apply them
./dc migrate
# to create superuser
./dc createsuperuser
# to start the local development server
./dc startapp
- Navigate to [http://0.0.0.0:8000]
- You can log in as a Django superuser by going to [http://localhost:8080/admin] and using the app
To run all tests
./dc manage test
To run a specific test case
./dc manage test api.quiz.tests.test_questionnaire_responses_list.QuestionnaireResponseAnswersListGraphQLTest
- flake8 linting
- python tests
- Django 3.2.13
- Django Rest Framework 3.13.1
- Python 3.8
- Postgres 14.3
Used flake8 for coding standards and sink to check for query optimization
Hmmmm.. This code test is going to be interesting and challenging at the same time as this project requires GraphQl skills which I don't expertise in. I tried GraphQL but never implemented in a real time project. All my projects were either Django using REST framework or AWS serverless. Eager to take this as a challenge and see how far can I go coding :)
I faced some challenges getting the project up and running mainly due to version not being pinned down.
Had to downgrade the django version from 4.0.4 to 3.2.13 to resolve the following error:
ImportError: cannot import name ‘force_text’ from ‘django.utils.encoding’
I had two directions to approach the project:
- Go ahead and upgrade the entire project and resolve the error. But I assumed this would take more time. I wanted to concentrate on models and code structure more than resolving the issues.
- Go ahead and downgrade the django version which is suitable with the other packages. In this way I could concentrate on the code base.
Started building the project, base model structure etc. Gone through a lot of online tutorials and read a lot of GraphQL documentation.
My first encounter with an issue was a strange behaviour with choice fields. The output returns as a string. I did some research and found some reference here.
I resolved this issue by including convert_choices_to_enum = False in object node.
Tried to implement relay in order to implement pagination which worked fine. But relay generates its own unique global ID which caused problems especially when trying to fetch a specific questionnaire using the actual ID instead of relay generated global ID.
Had to then fetch the global ID of the object and pass it in the GET serializer for the front end to consume. graphene.Node.to_global_id('QuestionnaireNode', obj.id)
Got hold of how to write api's and started concentrating on the logic more. Got most of the api's done. I created a new dc file in the root folder. This single file replaces the need for having the scripts folder and easier to main all docker related commands in a single place.
Started writing test cases for the api's. Found it fairly simple. Used GraphQLTestCase.
I realised there was no way a User can share other user's questionnaire if they liked it. Added create_by field to QuestionnaireResponses model
Implemented a way that the same shared link can be used for a questionnaire but have the ability to capture different responses of a user.
- Can register users who are answering and assign the user to QuestionnaireResponses model
- Integrate email forward to share questionnaire via an email
- Save user progress
- User can create copies of questionnaire and edit and share it
I really loved the challenge and learned a lot. I might have spent more time than what I planned for but it was time well spent. There are few things that I really love about the GraphQL. One being, the control on data in order to resolve over fetch and under fetch. I also liked the way pagination worked especially for nested objects.
Few things that I thought was difficult was validating the request data. This is easily achieved via the serializers in django. I read that we can use django serializers as well but I did not get the time to look at that.
I also did not like the fact that relay.Node.Field does not give the option to modify the queryset in-order to apply prefetch and select related.