Clinical Trials Project

💈Welcome to the CTP Monorepo💈

This repository is composed of two apps :

trials-service - Which is the service that exposes a resource of clinical trials
trials-cli - A command line interface that offers a convenient UX to access the clinical trials resources

We are using using turborepo to build the whole project

Installation

Clone the repository

  git clone git@github.com:ComradeAERGO/CTP.git
  cd CTP

Add the .env file to the root of the trials-service project Use the password to your redislab instance (or ask the maintainer for a password)

  cp .env.example .env

Then install the dependencies for both of the repos, just launch yarn from the root of the project

  yarn

Also note that in order to use turbo commands, turborepo needs to be installed globally. To do so, run

   yarn global add turbo

If you don't want to keep globally installed packages on your machine, once you are done, you can remove it by running which turbo and then deleting the returned folder.

To setup the cli app, go the trials-cli folder and link the package. Note than in some cases, the npm linkcommands requires the use of sudo.

  cd apps/trials-cli
  npm link

You can now use the cli app from anywhere on your machine, simply run trials

  trials

Like for turbo the package will be linked globally. You can remove it afterwards by running which trials and deleting the returned folder.

Running Tests

To run the tests, run the following command

  turbo test

Running the trials-service app

Run the following command and the server will start on http://localhost:3100

  turbo dev

Tech Stack

For the trials-service app

typescript as the base language
express as the main server framework
redis for caching
jest for testing
dotenv to handle .env file
nodemon to watch for changes
turborepo to handle the monorepo
prettier for code formatting

Architecture

Please find hereafter a diagram of the architecture of the trials-service app

At the root of the project lies the monorepo config files as well as the apps folder. Two projects are contained under the app folder:

trials-service
trials-cli

The trials-service app was built with the intent of following Hexagonal architecture patterns, in an attempt to try to keep its parts as loosely coupled as possible.

As a whole, the trials-service app is a simple server that exposes a resource of clinical trials. It is composed of several parts:

domain - The domain layer
application - The application layer, which contains the business logic
infrastructure - The infrastructure layer, which contains the implementation of the business logic
api - The api layer, which contains the express server and the controllers for the exposed routes
tests - The tests folder, which contains a few unit tests
utils - The utils folder, which contains shared utility methods

API Reference

Filter the trials by sponsor

  GET /api/ongoing-trials?sponsor=${sponsor}

Parameter	Type	Description
`sponsor`	`string`	sponsor to filter the trials.

Filter the trials by country

  GET /api/ongoing-trials?country=${country}

Parameter	Type	Description
`country`	`string`	country to filter trials.

Limitations

Trials-service

Deployment

The service is not yet deployed, this project is therefore agnostic to the deployment environment and the CI pipeline.
If we wanted to work into a cloud environment like Google Cloud Platform, we would have several options for the trials-service app:
- Deploy directly into Google App Engine to reduce the required amount of manual configuration
- Containerize into a docker container through docker-compose and deploy it to GCP Cloud Run
Both options would enable us to scale the service horizontally and vertically, and to monitor it through GCP's monitoring and logging tools.
Of course, other major cloud providers like AWS and Azure also offers similar capabilities.

Type validation

Usage of zod for type validation is currently limited to the infrastructure layer, when parsing data coming in from the JSON mocks. Since the mocks are immutable, it doesn't provide a lot of value. However, when plugged in to external data source, it would actually provide runtime type safety from potentially corruptible data source.

API Documentation

If the API grows, it would be nice to plug a Swagger to make the endpoints easy to navigate.

Trials-cli

Regarding the distribution of the trials-cli app, one of the most convenient options would be to bundle it into an npm package, publish it into a private repository, and install it globally using npm on the targeted machines.

ComradeAERGO / CTP