anisbak / bnr-blog-nerd-ranch-android

Android Coding Challenge

Thanks for your interest in joining our team! This repository has a half-finished app in it. There are some bugs, there's missing functionality, and there's a lot of room for improvement.

Your task is to make this app better. There are some specific issues we'd like you to be sure you fix, but how you choose to improve the app beyond that is entirely up to you. This lets you show your coding ability without being at a whiteboard or having someone look over your shoulder while you code.

Blog app

We've begun to build an app to showcase all our amazing content from our blog. A user of our app should be able to:

1. View a quick summary of all of our blog posts
2. Read a selected blog post in its entirety

Getting Started

Open the project in Android Studio & run the code to see the current state of the app. You should be able to see the titles of a number of blog posts, and tap into them to see their contents.

Known Issues

We're midway through development on this app. And while we've got a good amount of it written, there are a few things we know we need to fix before we can ship it:

• Our RecyclerView rows just show the title for each post. It should show title, author, summary, and publish date.
• The UI is bare-bones right now. It should look nicer.
• The app re-fetches everything from the server across a configuration change.
• Archibald's massive blog post takes a long time to download from the server, and it's slowing the whole app down. We should improve the user experience for large posts like this.
• The networking code is duplicated in both of our activities. We should clean that up.
• There are no tests. It'd be nice to have some tests to verify the quality of our work. This could require refactoring the architecture.

The APIs

There are 2 REST APIs that this app uses. The first one provides metadata on blog posts. This includes things like the author, a short summary, and the date that the post was published.

The post-metadata API

GET /post-metadata/42

{
  "id": "42",
  "title": "Morbi congue diam eu magna",
  "publishDate": "2018-07-15T23:03:29Z",
  "postId": "1042",
  "summary": "Donec dictum ligula purus, ut suscipit arcu cursus ut.",
  "author": {
    "name": "Kerri Ferguson",
    "image": "/images/authors/kerri.jpg",
    "title": "iOS Engineer"
  }
}

Here's what each of these fields represent:

• id - The ID of the metadata object. It will always match the ID in the URL.
• title - The title of the blog post
• publishDate - An ISO 8061 timestamp when the post was first published.
• postId - The ID of the post object this metadata references. Usually it will be the same as the id value, but that's not guaranteed.
• summary - A short description of the blog post.
• author - An object with author data, specifically:
  • name - The author's name
  • title - The author's title
  • image - An absolute path to an image of the author. This should be interpreted as hosted on the same domain as the API.

You can also get a list of all metadata objects by issuing a GET request without an ID.

GET /post-metadata

The post api

The second API is for retrieving the full content of the blog post:

GET /post/1042

{
  "id": "1042",
  "metadata": {
    "id": "42",
    "...": "..."
  },
  "body": "Lorem ipsum dolor ... posuere lacus tincidunt."
}

Here's what each of these fields represent:

• id - The ID of the post object. It will always match the ID in the URL.
• metadata - The metadata for this blog post. All properties on this object match those from the post-metadata API.
• body - The content of the blog post.

You can also get a list of all post objects by issuing a GET request without an ID:

GET /post

Mock server

While the Services team is building the production API, we have a mock server we can run locally. This provides the same interface that our production API will and includes some sample data.

To start the mock server, select "mockserver" from the "Select Run/Debug Configuration" drop down box and click "Run mockserver" button (green arrow).

To stop the mock server, click the stop button (red square) and select "mockserver"

The mock server is hosted at http://localhost:8106.

The API design is locked, so you shouldn't need to change the mock server at all.