TheLucasMoore / msg

A messaging API

Getting started

Msg Api 3000

You can access all these endpoints in production at https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/

Local Development

This application is written in Ruby and uses Sinatra and Rack. I will assume you have ruby and bundler installed.

To get this app running locally, run the following commands.

$ git clone https://github.com/TheLucasMoore/msg.git
$ cd msg
$ bundle install
$ rake db:create
$ rake db:migrate
$ rake db:seed RACK_ENV=development

Then to boot the app locally, with seeded data, we'll use rack.

$ rackup

If for some reason you don't have rack installed, you can run gem install rack.

You should then be able to hit http://localhost:9292/ and see Brad Pitt dancing. Nice! Note: You can replace https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/ with http://localhost:9292/ for all the following examples if running this locally.

Testing

$ bundle exec rspec --format documentation

This command will run the whole test suite for you.

API Docs

Users

The users controller is a RESTful way to see what seeded data we have to play around with.

The first spot to check out is the index at https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/users.

You should see an array of all the users.

[{"id":89,"name":"Courtney Orn"},{"id":90,"name":"Mrs. Gwendolyn Torp"}]

To see more about a user, go to https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/users/1 where :id is that user's id. Here we can see all the conversations that this user is a part of:

{"user":{"id":1,"name":"Mrs. Gwendolyn Torp"},"conversations":[{"id":2,"name":"I Know You Rider discussion thread"}]}

Messages

Reading Messages

To get all messages sent by all users you can GET https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/messages. This endpoint takes the same two parameters to limit the response by number and time.

• GET https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/messages?number_messages=1
• GET https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/messages?days_ago=1

To see all the messages a user has sent, you can use https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/users/1/messages

Posting Messages

To send a message from one user to another, you can POST to https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/messages with three parameters:

1. sender_id - who is sending this message
2. receipient_id - to whom it should go
3. text - the contents of the text messages

As an example:

$ curl -X POST 'https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/messages/?sender_id=1&receipient_id=2&text=Hi'

This will return the sent message.

{"id":16702,"user_id":1,"text":"Hi","conversation_id":72,"created_at":"2020-01-29T02:20:17.132Z"}

This will add a new message into two users conversations. If there isn't an existing conversation thread, it will create one.

Note: This one doesn't work on Heroku. Try it locally with curl -X POST 'http://localhost:9292/messages?sender_id=1&receipient_id=2&text=Hi'

Conversations

A conversation is where messages live. A conversation has many users, but for the sake of this app we'll have the two required users.

To see all the back-and-forth messages in a conversation, check out the data at https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/conversations/1 This endpoint also has parameters to limit by number of messages and by timeframe.

Limit to number of messages

To limit to the last hundred messages within a conversation, use https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/conversations/1?number_messages=100

[
  {"id":16700,"user_id":3,"text":"Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually.","conversation_id":72,"created_at":"2020-01-29T02:08:25.854Z"},
  {"id":16701,"user_id":4,"text":"Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. ","conversation_id":72,"created_at":"2020-01-29T02:08:25.858Z"},
  {"id":16702,"user_id":3,"text":"Hi","conversation_id":72,"created_at":"2020-01-29T02:20:17.132Z"},
  ... and on and on
]

Limit by time

To limit to messages of a conversation within a certain timeframe use https://msg-api-3000.herokuapp.com/conversations/1?days_ago=30

Testing

To run the test suite, use this command:

$ bundle exec rspec --format documentation

Trade Offs and Considerations

• My first consideration here is scaling. When building a messaging API that can send a message between two users, I did not want to simple hard-code a sender_id and recipient_id into the Message model. What if we want to add group messaging soon? So I have the Conversation model with many users, which allows the ability to add many users into a group thread if we want to eventually.

• This app is built with Sinatra because I thought Rails would be a bit heavy-handed. This sticks to models and controllers. Plus, getting out of my confort zone is fun! This decision also meant I spent some time on configuration of things that "just work" in Rails, like the database connection and test setup.

• Testing is not complete. I showed how a few Controller and Model test are structured and I decided to stop with those.

• Model validations are also not super verbose at the moment, since I'm relying on seeded data to play around with this project.

• The seeded data has all the same "created_at" timestamp, so time filtering seems to be all-or-nothing. In reality, the messages were all made on the same day.

• The JSON data is not pretty. I know that. I'm assuming this is just an API and consumers will ingest the JSON directly into a UI.

• The deployed app is on a free Heroku dyno, so please be patient with the first load. =)

Bibliography

• Many sources are sprinkled around in code comments here and there, but these are good resource I found in building this.
• Followed the setup docs
• Setting up rspec
• Configuring Rack and setting up multiple controllers
• Deploying Rack apps to Heroku
• Running Rake commands on Heroku