README

A ruby on rails web store for COM2025 coursework.
What follows is general house keeping stuff, read on for notes on: config, setup, testing, design, funky behaviour etc. For a table of responses to the CW marking questions goto Marking Notes

Configuration

• Dev Env

  • Built in ruby mine 2020.2 on ubuntu 20.04
  • Using Ruby version 2.5.7-p206
  • With Rails version 5.2.4.4
  • Using sqlite as the databse (The heroku branch runs postgres but has been put on hold for now)
  • Repo mirrored on gitlab and github. Both repo's will be set to public view once submission date has passed
    • gitlab: https://gitlab.eps.surrey.ac.uk/ab02259/com2025-coursework
    • github: https://github.com/Abutler101/Com2025-Coursework
  • Tested to be working in chrome Version 86.0.4240.198
  • Validation of functionality on lab machines is expected to take place later today has been completed
  • Image magick version 6.9.10-23 Q16 installed to fulfil dependency of gem

Setup (validated on heron 100 13:50 09/12/2020)

• git clone gitlab@gitlab.eps.surrey.ac.uk:ab02259/com2025-coursework.git OR git clone git@github.com:Abutler101/Com2025-Coursework.git OR download ZIP from coursework upload
• bundle install --path vendor/bundle
• rake db:drop
• rake db:create
• rake db:migrate
• rake db:seed
• rails db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test
• run tests to confirm setup
• rails s

Testing

To run all tests:

rake test  

Expected output:

Finished in 29.029574s, 3.7548 runs/s, 8.4052 assertions/s.
109 runs, 244 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Design

The problem was defined as an ecommerce site, this gave way to the identification of the following objects:

• Users - store personal info relating to a human owner of a unique email address
• Products - store info relating to a product, of which there is some amount in stock
• Orders - Associate groups of order entries to users
• Order entries - store how many of a given item were sold in a given order
• Reviews - store a review and rating of a product by a user
• Product Sections - associate groups of products to shared property
• Shopping carts - temporarily store products of interest for a given user

For each of these objects, properties and relationships were identified with the objective of producing a normalised database. In addition to the model objects, sessions were introduced to track logins. The decision was made to store carts as cookies instead of in the DB or as a session var, to avoid the time out issues of sessions variables and reduce the database size. While not ideal, as this is only a simple implementation of a shopping cart, cookies were the best fit. If, features such as email prompts along the lines of: "You left something in your cart, come back and purchase here's a discount" etc were planned then the cart system would be moved over to Database storage with a similar table layout to the current order, order entry pair of tables.

Notes

• heron 100 config on day of validation:
  • ruby 2.5.1p57
  • rails 5.2.4.4
  • ImageMagick 6.9.7-4 Q16
• seeded user accounts:

email address	password	Type
Test1@testacc.com	blank	User
Test2@testacc.com	blank	User
admin@testacc.com	blank	Admin

Funky Behaviour

• The dropdown for sections seems to work intermittently- the suspected cause is something to do with the page loading in a weird order. Reloading or using the navbar to move to another page seems to fix the issue of the non-responsive dropdown