ic-768 / film-db

One-week coding assignment

Film DB!

Live Link

https://filmdb.onrender.com

Note: Refreshing the page redirects to / on the live version due to the server configuration, but running it locally, url params will be preserved and passed to state on initial render.

Running the app

This app expects a .env file in the project root with a key for REACT_APP_API_KEY

e.g.

REACT_APP_API_KEY=9a6sdf8

It has been .gitignored for best security practices.

Once that's done, you can go ahead and run the typical npm i and npm start

Basic details

The user is stored as a simple username, along with an array of the user's favorite films in localStorage. There is no authentication or backend registration whatsoever.

The application is broken up into 4 pages:

• login
• main
• movie
• favorites

Login

The login page comprises a simple HTML form. When it's submitted the state and localStorage are updated with the username and any favorites that reside in local storage.

Main

The main page contains - among other things - the search filters, displays the movie results, and has buttons to increment/decrement the page count.

Movie

Once the user has searched for films, they can then click on one to see a more detailed view.

Favorites

Displays the user's favorites in a list, which the user can then click on to see the detailed view of the film.

Technical details

Folder Structure

The app has 4 folders in the /src directory:

• common
• pages
• context
• hooks

Common

Houses data, functions, and types that are used throughout the application.

Components

Keeps all of the individual components. They haven't been further organised due to the relatively small size of the app.

Context

Provides all context API functionality.

Hooks

Has a couple of custom hooks.

Global data (context)

Three data types were considered fit to be shared across nearly the whole application:

• loading status
• notifications
• user data (username and favorites)

Loading and Notifications are displayed with absolutely positioned components in the outer application, so the functionality to set their state is provided through the context API.

Similarly, the user has to be set and unset in a couple situations, i.e. login and signout - similarly for the user's favorites.

Hooks

After noticing some common patterns in the code, two hooks were created to clean it up:

• useAsyncAction
• useFavorite

UseAsyncAction

Fetch a url, parse the JSON, check for error, call a function if successful otherwise set an error notification.

This hook was extracted so as to abstract the process. It returns a function that accepts a URL route, an errorMessage, and a callback to execute on success - it handles all of the aformentioned steps.

UseFavorite

Returns three functions relating to individual movies:

• Add to favorites (in context and local storage).
• Remove from favorites (in context and local storage).
• Check if it is already favorited.