The first exercise is about cleaning up code in a web service. You have just joined a start-up on pet health care and have become the maintainer of a web service for a veterinary service. It provides pet clinics with a database for storing pets, owners and their appointments at the clinic.
This repository contains the application back-end implementing a REST API, which is what you will be working with. Fortunately, the app has plenty of documentation.
The previous maintainer told you that you should be able to clone this repository and build and start the project with Maven or an IDE like IntelliJ. Once started, the back-end provides a Swagger-UI at http://localhost:9966/petclinic for testing its functions.
You have heard of complaints that one of the features of the app is buggy: The CSV import allows administrator users to quickly add or delete many pets to or from the database.
Under the REST endpoint /api/import, the app allows users
to upload CSV files with content such as the following.
fifi;2015-02-03;dog;Franklin;add
lassie;2010-02-03;dog;Franklin;delete
felix;2020-02-03;cat;Franklin;add
The columns are the name of a pet, its birth date, its type, its owner's last name and an action (add or delete). Uploading the above example file would add the dog fifi and the cat felix to the data base, and delete the dog lassie. In all three cases the owner is Benjamin Franklin. The CSV-file only contains the owner's last name.
Now, you have heard reports that it can sometimes crash with manually edited data. You decide to look at the code to see how it can be improved. You find the code in ImportCSV.java and decide to clean it up before you fix any errors.
Create a fork of this repository and clean up the code in ImportCSV.java to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, company policy disallows the use of any additional dependencies, so you cannot use any external libraries.
Improve the code further to make it more robust. If the input csv date is bad, the app should return a proper error message rather than just crashing. You may have already noticed and fixed some problems already in task 1. Task 2 is to resolve them all.
After completing tasks 1 and 2, submit the resulting code by submitting a pull request with your changes in github.
After all groups have submitted their cleaned up code, each group will be given another group's submission for code review. Please make comments to provide feedback, e.g., where you still see problems in the code or where you think that a good solution was found.
- Create a fork of this repository.
- Clone the forked project and look at the documentation for working with it.
- Finish task 1 and 2 by tomorrow noon and submit a pull request with your changes.
- After submission, you will receive another group's submission to review. Please then finish task 3 until the next session by making review comments on the pull request in github.