Communication-Platform

Description

This project provides an email endpoint to trigger an email service. If one of the email services is down or results in an error, an alternate service defined in the project is used. Currently we support Sendgrid and Postmark APIs to send email.

Requirements

This project currently works with:

• Ruby 2.6.3
• PostgreSQL
• Sinatra

Usage

• Run bundle install
• Copy .env.example to .env and add environment variables to .env
• Run rake db:create db:migrate
• To start the project run rackup
• Use Postman or cURL to send json request to the enpoint
• Send your json POST request to /email endpoint with the correct email attributes

What does it do?

This application will perform the following steps:

1. Fetch email parameters from your request
2. Validates the attributes provided
3. Go through a defined hash to look for which service to use
4. Run an API request with NET::HTTP and send payload to the email service provider's API
5. Log the sent email with the API response in the emails table
6. The email endpoint does not log unsuccessful email attemps in the table
7. Returns a json response based on the results

Email request parameters

Not authentication or headers are required for this request The attributes expected are: to, to_name, from, from_name, body, subject

NOTE: If any of these attributes are missing or unexpected attributes sent, that will result in an error

Sample Request Body

{ "to": "your_email", "to_name": "reciever_name", "from": "reciever_email", "from_name": "your_name", "subject": "subject", "body": "email body" }

Delayed Delivery

• Delayed delivery or scheduling is not currently supported by the Postmark API
  • We confirmed this by going through the documentation and contacting the Postmark API support as well
  • Best way to achieve email scheduling with Postmark would be by going with a custom built solution such as cron-jobs
• Email scheduling has been implemented using the Sendgrid API
• If send_at attribute is sent the email service API wont switch and only use Sendgrid without alternating to Postmark

How to use email scheduling

• To use email scheduling make use of the send_at attribute. If this attribute is not set the service will default to deliver the email instantaneously

• The format for the send_at attribute uses this format: DD MM YYYY HR:MIN:SEC +GMT

• Sample request attributes listed below 23 09 2019 18:17:06 -05:00 23 11 2019 07:00:00 +05:00

• Sample json request with time { "to": "[email protected]", "to_name": "RECIEVER NAME", "from": "[email protected]", "from_name": "SENDER NAME", "subject": "BODY", "body": "HTML TEXT", "send_at": "23 9 2019 15:00:00 +00:00" }

Webhooks

• We are accepting webhook requests from both Sendgrid and Postmark
• The webhook respones are stored with the event trigger type and other information in a seperate table(webhook_logs)
• Sendgrid webhook is recieved at the /sg_webhook endpoint
• Postmark webhook is recieved at the /pm_webhook endpoint

Test cases

• Run rake db:create db:migrate RACK_ENV=test
• rack-test and rspec are used for test cases
• VCR and Webmock is used for API calls
• API calls only run once in test cases and stored to be used in all the next executions
• Database cleaner runs before and after all contexts and before every test suite
• Before running the tests make sure Sendgrid and Postmark API keys are configured correctly
• Add correct and verified to_email and registered_sender emails according to the API(without this test cases will fail)
• To run all test cases just type rspec on your terminal
• To run a specific test file use rspec -I . spec/<folder_name>/<file_name>