Building an Interactive Spreadsheet System
Today, the vast majority of businesses implement their commission plan models in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or some other spreadsheet software. In this challenge, you will implement a simplified spreadsheet system that can be used to implement an extremely simple financial model.
Requirements
- Implement a web server with a RESTful API that models a spreadsheet supporting cells, values, and formulas.
- For simplicity, the size of the spreadsheet can be assumed to be fixed to 10
rows and 10 columns.
- Columns are named after capital letters, starting with "A".
- Rows are numbered and increasing, starting from "1".
- The state of the spreadsheet should be mutatable via API calls.
- After a given API call to update a cell, update any affected cells with their newly computed values.
- Cell updates should take as input either an integer or a simple formula that
references other cells and only needs to support addition.
- For example,
-1
and123
should be able to be stored in a cell. =A1+B1
should be able to be stored in a cell, and the display value should be the result of evaluating the sum of the value inA1
and the value inB1
.
- For example,
Out-of-scope
- Don't worry about handling multiple concurrent users viewing and editing the spreadsheet at the same time.
Background
The sample code distributed with this package is provided to you as a starting point if you'd like to use it.
Setup
- Set up your virtualenv:
python3 -mvenv venv
- Source the
activate
script:source venv/bin/activate
- Install the dependencies in your virtualenv:
pip install -r requirements.txt
- Run the server
FLASK_DEBUG=1 FLASK_APP=server.py flask run