Flight Booker

Ongoing.

Pages

1. Homepage
2. Search Flight
3. Booking Detail / Passenger Form(s)

User flow

User opens airline homepage User clicks 'Search Flight' button User navigates to search flight page User fills form > From and To (City) > Number of Passengers > Date Site updates page with flight search results with details User picks desired flight User clicks 'Book Flight' button User navigates to Booking Detail page User fills passenger form(s) with first name, last name, and email User clicks 'Confirm Booking' button Site updates booking page with passenger detail, with 'view ticket' option

Initial Model Layout

Table Design

flight: airline, departure_id, arrival_id, flight_time, stops, gate

airport: airport_name, airport_code, city, country, latitude, longitude, timezone

passenger first_name, last_name, email

booking flight_id, passenger_id

Model Association Design

class Flight < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :origin, class_name: "Airport", primary_key: "code"
    belongs_to :destination, class_name: "Airport", primary_key: "code"
    has_many :bookings
    has_many :passengers, through: :bookings

class Airport < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :departures, class_name: "Flight", foreign_key: "origin_id"
    has_many :arrivals, class_name: "Flight", foreign_key: "destination_id"

class Booking < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :flight
    has_many :passengers
    accepts_nested_attributes_for :passengers

class Passenger < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :booking
    has_many :flights, through: :booking
    self.primary_key: "code"

Thoughts

Initially, this project instructs you to use a new primary key for your Flight-Airport association. Namely airports should be identified by its 'code' instead of Rails' default id. But after some research, I find that people don't really recommend this since it goes against Rails' principles https://stackoverflow.com/questions/750413/altering-the-primary-key-in-rails-to-be-a-string

Decided to try out bootstrap for css in this framework. Right off the bat, i ran into trouble with navbar overlays https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10336194/top-nav-bar-blocking-top-content-of-the-page

Gave a try on simple-forms since everyone in rails seems to recommend it. But i couldn't get it to work for my search form just yet, so I switched back to vanilla by using form_for or form_with

Stumble upon elasticsearch when i was trying to build a search form. Might be worth to take a look in the future

I was confused about how to store durations on a database. Tried to use the time dataype but when I try to input "01:15:00" it adds a date upfront for some reason. In any case, I found a solution to instead store time only as seconds and store it as an integer. Then you can perform calculations on it if you want to show into hours and minutes. This way it is supposed to be faster. (You can store in mins, but I prefer to be precise) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1051465/using-a-duration-field-in-a-rails-model

Got into the datetime problem. I was having trouble calling only the date from the date time variable in the controller. I figured, who not just have them stored separately, like flight_date and flight_time. But I managed to find the solution anyway, I needed only to put some methods on the model file.

andikawilliam / flight-booker