Parallel Markets Investor Intake Web App

See this document for detailed specifications to the problem.

Dependencies & Building

Python 3 is available by default on almost all Linux and macOS systems. So you should in theory be able to just use Python's built-in pip package manager to install the 2 project dependencies.

However it's usually recommended that you create an isolated environment for your project to mitigate the possibility of installed packages (and their pulled-in dependencies) from breaking your base OS Python environment. Many popular and well established tools exist for this very purpose, such as venv, virtualenv, pipenv, poetry.

I personally prefer to use the Miniconda package & environment manager, which can be used as follows:

Download the installation script from the Miniconda link above, run and follow the prompts to install
$ conda create -n para-mark python=3 to create an environment dedicated to running this project
$ conda activate para-mark to activate the above environment
$ conda install flask flask-sqlalchemy to install the project dependencies
cd into the project root, and you're ready to run the web application

Once complete, use $ conda deactivate to exit the conda environment

Run the Web App

At the project root, there is a CLI script for managing the database, which for simplicity's sake is chosen to be SQLite. Run $ ./db-cli.py -h to see all the options available.

For a quickstart of the web application, simply run $ ./db-cli.py -c, which will create an instance of a SQLite database at /tmp/parallel-markets/.

With the database intialized, the correct environment activated, execute $ flask run to serve the web app from your localhost interface. You can optionally pass a --port number if the default one of 5000 is taken.

In case, something doesn't work, you can set the environment variable FLASK_ENV to development to get thorough debugging help on the console and from the browser.

Combining all the above, we can do:

$ FLASK_ENV=development flask run --port=8000

Web App Usage

Once the app is served, it can be accessed from any browser at http://localhost:8000 or whichever port you selected.

The web app consists of a single page with multiple form inputs, which are used to sequentially enter information of potential investors. All information are required, they are:

first name
last name
date of birth (YYYY-MM-DD)
phone number (10-digit US/Canada)
address (street, US State, 5-digit zip code)
1 or more documents to be uploaded to the server

If all information are valid, then the investor's info and his/her uploaded document(s) will be saved to the SQLite database created earlier. There are 2 tables in the database:

investor - contains all information
document - contain the file names of all uploads, with investor ID as the foreign key

Note: investor and document is a one-to-many relationship

To inspect the contents of the database, execute $ ./db-cli.py without any options, or specify a specific table with -i or -d for the investor and document table respectively.

TODO List

Features

detecting and handling updating phone numbers and/or addresses for existing investors with matching names & date of birth
encrypt uploaded files, since the uploaded documents likely contain sensitive data
allow skipping file upload when updating existing users
authentication & authorization
add page to allow supseruser to view all existing investors that have been entered
allow superuser or authenticated users to download their own uploaded file(s)

Database & Models

add normalized name columns to investor table
add more columns to the document table for storing useful file attributes: e.g. filetype (extension, MIME), size, upload date, etc.
use separate tables for investors' phone number(s) & address(es), since these can potentially be one-to-many relationships
use interfaces for the application model classes, which should allow switching DBs easier (SQLite doesn't support concurrent writes)
create database schema using SQL scripts instead of the ORM, to allow for better cross framework/language portability

Application Logic

add application config file for convenient configuration of database storage location, upload folder, secret key, etc.
use WTForms to properly validate form inputs (e.g. allow international phone numbers)

Front-End

add styles using a CSS library (e.g. Bootstrap, Tailwind)
use more appropriate input forms where applicable (e.g. date-picker for DOB, dropdown for US State)

Miscellaneous

add tests

jyscao / parallel-markets-webapp