nbs-appointments-management-service

Introduction

An appointment and booking api designed to support national vaccination bookings.

Product Backlog

Slack chanel - #appointments-service

Team

• Sponsor - James Spirit
• Product Owner - Lauren Caveney
• Development Team - Vincent Crowe, Sam Biram, Kim Crowe, Khurram Aziz, Saritha Lakkreddy
• Past Development Team - Joe Farina

Technologies

• Dotnet V8
• C# V12
• Azure Functions V4
• Javascript/Typescript (React V18)
• Next.js V14
• Cosmos document database

Project Goal

We will build an Appointments API using

• Will follow REST principles as much as possible
• Github (for code repo)
• Azure Devops (for CI pipelines)
• C# (development language)
• Azure Functions (as a platform for hosting)

We will build a web based application for appointment and site management

• We will use React/Next.js
• Github (for code repo)
• Azure Devops (pipelines)
• Azure Web Apps (to host the NextJS server)

GitHub Repo and signed commits

The repo has signed commits enabled. This means that only commits that are verified can be merged into the main branch. More information about signed commits can be found here.

Your workstation will need to be set up to use signed commits. Please follow this guide for instructions.*

*At the time of writing this guide is missing a step in the Windows section. After running git config --global commit.gpgsign true you must then run git config --global user.signingkey <key> to actually tell git about the key you just created.

Running Locally

Setup

• Install Docker for Windows (use Linux Containers)
• Install .NET 8.0
• Install the Azure Functions Core Tools
• Install Node V20
• Install NPM

VS Code Setup (optional)

If you are using VS Code, you may find it beneficial to open the repo by opening the nbs-ams.code-workspace file itself. This will open a workspace configured with several productivity boons:

• The Explorer window is split into folders for convenience and to make navigating the repo quicker/easier
• Terminals can be opened straight into any of these folders using the ctrl-shift-' command
• Default build tasks have been configured for Dotnet and Typescript. You can run these with the ctrl-shift-b command
• Non-build tasks have been configured for starting the docker, dotnet, and NextJS services. These are configured in tasks.json folders and can be ran through Terminal -> Run Task...

Running locally

Each of the following steps needs to be done in a separate terminal window

• Run containerised services
  • From the root folder run docker compose --profile local up --build -d
  • (OR if using VS Code) run the Start local development containers task

It is also possible to run next and api services locally not using docker:

• Start mock-api, mock-oidc-server and cosmos containers:
  • run docker compose up --build -d mock-api oidc-server cosmos
• Run the API
  • From the folder /src/api/Nhs.Appointments.Api run the command func start
  • (OR if using VS Code) run the Clean and Run API task
• Run the Web Application
  • From the folder /src/client/ run npm install and then run npm run dev
  • (OR if using VS Code) run the Run Client in Dev Mode task

Setting a cert for the OIDC server

To run the oidc-server you will need to install a certificate. You will need to generate and trust a dev cert with the following command (in order to ensure that the certificate is placed in the correct location you should run the command from your user profile folder or amend the command accordingly).

dotnet dev-certs https -ep .aspnet/https/aspnetapp.pfx -p password -t -v

Notes about configuration

The API expects cosmos to be running at "https://localhost:8081" The API expects the mockapi to be running at "http://localhost:4011" The Web Application expects the API to be running at "http://localhost:7071"

If your configuration causes any of these to be running differently then you will need to change the application configuration files accordingly. (Or use environment variables to override local configuration)

API configuration file is found at /src/Nhs.Appointments.Api/localsettings.json Client configuration file is found at /src/new-client/.env

Exploring the Cosmos Database

When running locally in docker the data in the cosmos database can be viewed and modified using the cosmos emulator explorer. To access the explorer visit https://localhost:8081/_explorer/index.html (note you may get an unsafe page warning unless you import the certificate from the cosmos container, this can safely be ignored for this url)

Seeding the Cosmos Database

To meaningfully explore the API/frontend you'll need a minimum set of data present in the Cosmos DB. There is a .NET Console App which uploads a set of cosmos-friendly documents in /src/mock-data/CosmosDbSeeder.

You simply need to run this app to upload the default mock data. If using VS Code you can do this by running the Seed Cosmos task. You can also run it manually with the dotnet run terminal command in that folder.

The folder/file structure within the items folder matches the desired structure in Cosmos 1:1 (that is, there will be a Cosmos container called index_data which will contain each child .json file as a document). If you wish to create or modify a container simply alter these files, then re-run the seeder. Remember that if you run the app manually you will need to run dotnet clean first for the changes to be picked up (the VS Code task does this for you automatically).

Alternatively, you can upload these files one at a time yourself through the emulator's browser interface.

Authenticating calls to the API

REST calls using an API user must be signed (via HMAC) using the key associated with the api user. The api user is identified using the ClientId header - so the in the above example a signed request with a ClientId header of dev would be needed to make api calls

Tests

Frontend Unit Tests (using Jest)

From ~/src/new-client:

• Ensure you have ran npm i
• Simply run npm run test

If running the workspace in VS Code, the Jest tests should be automatically discovered in the test explorer window. You should be able to run and debug them via the UI.

Frontend E2E Tests (using Playwright)

From ~/src/new-client:

• Ensure you have ran npm i
• The very first time you run the tests you will need to run npx playwright install. This instructs Playwright to download and instantiate the latest version of the browsers it requires.
• Ensure the Docker and .NET services are running following their respective setup commands (In the future we hope to be set these up automatically)
• Optionally run the frontend app (If you're not already running it, Playwright will start it up for you)
• Run npm run test:e2e. Optionally if you wish to view a step-by-step visual output of each test, run npm run test:e2e:ui.