Hotels Data Merge

Simple application for merging hotel data from various sources.

Stack

• Node.JS (Express)
• TypeScript (3+)
• memory-cache NPM package
• Axios for sending requests
• Mocha, Chai for testing
• ApiDoc, TypeDoc for generating documentation

Installation

Prerequisites:

• Node.JS
• NPM installed globally

After cloning the project, run: npm install to download the dependencies.

Next, run npm run build to compile TypeScript files into JavaScript.

To run the build in watch mode, you can execute the npm run build:watch command.

The compiled JavaScript can be found in the build folder.

Running the application

Simply run the npm start command to start the webserver. The server will start listening on http://localhost:3000.

Requests

There is one endpoint: POST /hotels.

Request body parameters:

• ids : string array
• destination: number

Providing at least one of the parameters is required. If both of them are given, then destination is ignored.

Use Postman, cURL or any other API testing tool to send JSON requests.

Examples:

curl -s -d '{"ids": ["iJhz"]}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:3000/hotels

curl -s -d '{"ids": ["SjyX", "f8c9"]}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:3000/hotels

curl -s -d '{"destination": 5432}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:3000/hotels

Response format

The response is an array of JSON objects (Hotel object in the TypeScript source). For property names I chose usually the simpler but still clear names with Hungarian notation.

Properties:

• id (string)
• name (string)
• destinationId (number)
• description (string)
• bookingConditions (string array)
• amenities (Object)
  • general (string array)
  • room (string array)
• images (Object)
  • amenities (Object array)
    • url (string)
    • caption (string)
  • rooms (Object array)
    • url (string)
    • caption (string)
  • site (Object array)
    • url (string)
    • caption (string)
• location (Object)
  • address (string)
  • city (string)
  • country (string)
  • latitude (string)
  • longitude (string)

Merging techniques

The reasoning and explanation of merging the individual properties of the hotels:

• id: no merging necessary
• name: the longer name wins
• destinationId: no merging necessary
• description: by default, simply concatenating the two strings. If mergeDescriptions is set to false in the config, then longer descriptions wins.
• bookingConditions: booking conditions are trimmed and an array is created with only unique elements
• amenities: spaces are removed from amenities (in order to exclude duplicates like businesscenter and business center), then arrays are created with only unique elements
• images: each image collections are merged and URLs are made unique to avoid duplication
• location: the non-null value wins, for the country property, strings with length of 2 characters are preferred (for country codes like JP)

Testing

There are 7 simple API tests which use local mock hotel data (taken exactly from the original URLs).

To run tests, execute npm test

Documentation

API docs

To generate API docs: npm run apidoc

Open apidocs/index.html to see the documentation generated by ApiDoc (http://apidocjs.com/).

Developer docs

To generate developer docs: npm run docs

Open docs/index.html to see the documentation generated by TypeDoc (http://typedoc.org/).

Configuration

See config/default.json for configuration options:

• useCachedData:
  • true (default): the application will save the data in cache after startup and read data from it after each request.
  • false: the application will re-read data from the supplier sources after each request.
• mergeDescriptions:
  • true (default): hotel descriptions will be merged, resulting in a longer description.
  • false: the longer hotel description will be used.