BOLO Flier Creator Version 3

This project is the third iteration of the BOLO Flier Creator application concepted by the Pinecrest Police Department in Miami, Florida. The third version aims to re-engineer the application for security and scalability through the use of newer technologies both in hardware and software.

The current application stack consists of:

• Node.js
• Express
• IBM Bluemix PaaS
• Cloudant
• SendGrid

How to use

This app is designed to be used in a Node.js environment. Version 3 of the BOLO Flier Creator is designed to be used in conjunction with the Bluemix PaaS and CloudFoundry.

Using on Bluemix with CloudFoundry

tl;dr Add the Cloudant service to your Bluemix, create a manifest.yml file, connect your CloudFoundry CLI to the Bluemix API, push your app via the cf push command.

Steps

1. Add the Cloudant service to your Bluemix account:
   • Reference the Bluemix Cloudant docs for detailed instruction.
2. Create a manifest.yml file using the included manifest.yml.sample file in the project.
   • Make sure to remove the .sample extension from the filename.
   • Using the sample with IBM Bluemix, the only keys that should need to be changed are sevices, host, and name.
3. Connect your CloudFoundry CLI to the Bluemix API.
   • Reference the Bluemix CF CLI docs for detailed instructions.
4. Push your app: cf push

Development Notes

Secrets

In order for the application to run on a local machine your development environment needs to have specific Cloudant credentials set. All you need to do is save a file named .env in your project root with the needed environment variables set. Check the .env.example file to see the format and variables used in this project. Do not edit the .env.example file and/or commit it.

Testing

This project is using the following libraries for testing:

• Mocha Test Runner
• Chai Assertion Library
• Sinon.JS Test Double Library
• Mockery - Node.js require() Mocking Library

The project is set up for an effective BDD/TDD workflow. Tests are contained in the test/ directory which contain directories for unit, functional, and acceptance tests.

To execute Functional and Unit tests with coverage reports:
npm test

Coverage reports are stored in ./coverage directory.

To run individual tests:
mocha test/unit -or- npm run unit-test
mocha test/integration

The --watch flag can be used to watch for any changes to tests during development:
mocha --watch test/unit
mocha --watch test/integration

Note that acceptance tests have not been implemented yet. The project plans to use WebDriver for accpetance tests against user story scenarios. Changes to these plans will be noted as needed.

Documentation

The project requires all source code to be documented using JSDoc in order to generate documentation.

Generating Documentation

Generating the documentation is easy! Make sure that JSDoc is installed by using the npm install command. Then type npm run docs and that's it. Open jsdoc/index.html file in your browser to read. Enjoy.

References

Bluemix Guides and References

Design, manage, and test multi-instance Bluemix applications

• The application's session handling strategy needs to be refactored. Currently is is storing sessions in-memory which can cause a Bluemix instance to crash when too many sessions are stored. This guide talks about session handling via key-value stores like Redis and CouchDB (Cloudant) in the context of multi-instance applications.