wdi-sf-fall / apartment_rental_lab

Week 2 weekend lab

ApartmentRental App

Working with Relationships and Inheritance

Description

In this application we have three main types of things we are dealing with.

• Person
• Building
• Unit

Person

With Person we have two main subtypes:

• Manager
• Tenant

Both Manager and Tenant should inherit methods from Person, and implement any extra behavior they need to play their role in the App.

Relationships

• Manager has many Buildings.
• Tenant has a many References that are just Person instances with contact info.

Building

A Building should always have a Manager before Tenants can move in. All Tenants should have two references before moving in.

Relationships

• Building has many Units.
• Building has a Manager. A Tenant may not be the building manager.

Unit

• A Unit belongs to one Building and has one Tenant. As a rule, Managers are not allowed to live in the Building.

Phase I: Build out the apartment rental object model

Take a look at apartment rental object code stubs in src folder. The ground work is done, you need to fill in the blanks.

Run tests

You get a complete set of tests, they are all written for you . Yeah!

in project folder, run:

npm test

They should all fail!

In true TDD fashion, your task is to make them all pass!

You can target individual tests by calling test files directly, for example:

mocha test/rental_property/building_test.js

Take a close look at the tests

They tell you everything you need to implement apartment rental objects and their relationships. Check out how tests use apartment rental objects, like referencing properties and calling methods.

Playing In Console

• Open the node REPL and require('./src/app.js')

$ node
> var app = require('./src/app.js')

• Create a few objects and inspect them.

> var person = app.Person();
> var building = app.Building();
> var manager = app.Manager();

not much here, the objects are empty. As you build out objects and tests turn green, come back to REPL and play around, try out properties and methods that you added, experiment.

============

• A good place to start is look for low hanging fruits, like adding properties to your objects, if you do it right, it should turn a bunch of test green right off the bat.

• Then think about the relationships. For example, implementing inheritance for Manager

You could do the following:

var person = require("./person");

function Manager(name, contact) {
  this.name = name;
  this.contact = contact;
  this.buildings = [];
}

// Inheriting
Manager.prototype = new Person();
Manager.prototype.constructor = Manager;

But the following makes use of a cool call method you can use with functions that avoids a bunch extra work.

var person = require("./person");

function Manager(name, contact) {

  // Note here the use of "call"
  //  which will run the method 
  //  with a context.
  Person.call(this, name, contact);
  this.buildings = [];
}

// Inheriting
Manager.prototype = new Person();
Manager.prototype.constructor = Manager;

etc .

Phase II: Write Appartent Rental app

Once all tests succeed, go and write an apartment rental app for the Waterfront Tower down the road. We understand that you strive to be web developers, yet the app your are going to build is a good old command line interface app. But good news, again, the ground work is already done. In the src folder, run:

node main.js

DEMO (the app is not very user friendly ...)

Check out the beautiful user interface! Feature 1 to 5 are already implemented. Inspect main.js and take a look at how the menu is set up. Implement the missing menu functions. A good place to start is menu item 6 Show available units. It should be very similar to 5.

Hint: You will find yourself iterating over arrays quite a lot. Why not use the Iterators module that you built this week?