rafolo78 / kaluza-device-list

Kaluza device list SPA exercise

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.

How to run this

The backend server provided by Kaluza team must be up and running. The service providing the device info must be available at http://localhost:8080/devices/

Once this repo has been cloned, run the script:

npm install

To install all required dependencies and then:

npm start

Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits.
You will also see any lint errors in the console.

What I have used

In order to implement this MVP as a single page application I have worked with this stack:

React

I have written components with functional style when using stateless components and ES6 classes when building stateful components.

Redux

Used to manage the app state. In this case we are storing the following info in the store:

• deviceList: an array with all info related to devices
• loading: boolean flag to know if the info is being loaded
• error: in case there's an error fetching the devices store the error
• typeDisplayed: the current device type that is being displayed in the list. In case is null all device types will be displayed.
• filter: the value of current filter used for the device status. Values could be All,Online,Offline

Styled Components

Used to style the spa.

Other dependencies used

Redux-thunk

Used to make asynchronous requests in the action creators

MomentJs

Used to work with dates in JS

Styled Normalize

Used to normalize browsers default styles with styled components

Folder structure

Because it's a very simple application I haven't used a very fancy folder structure.

index.js

This is the entry point of our React App

App.js

Here is where our app is initialized

config.js

Here we store information used to configure our application that can be dependant on the evironment (dev, test, prod). API urls, API keys, Formats, languages,...

store.js

Here we create the redux store and load any middleware used.

pages

Here we store components that wrap a whole page, in this case we only have one DeviceListPage.

components

As mentioned before, because it's a small app we are storing all components used here. For a larger app this won't be very scalable because it will grow and won't be easy to handle the large list of components. A different approach should be used for a larger app like fractal or similar.

state

Here is where we manage the redux state. I have used ducks file structure to organise action names, action creators and reducers. Duck files structure

static

Here we store all static files needed, images, videos, .... (in this case, just a couple of images stolen from Kaluza site :-) )

styles

Here we store the style component theme, global styles and everything related to styling that is reused across the app

Suggesting further improvements

I was not sure if these should be part of the MVP, because of time constraints I decided not to include them and just leave some notes here about them.

Make the app Responsive

It was not mentioned in the exercise description so I decided to make this work for desktop resolutions. In "real life" this should be displayed correctly in mobile devices.

Loading spinner while fetching devices

This should be nice, I have left the boolean flag implemented in the redux state. So the idea is that while the flag loading is true render a loading spinner, otherwise try to render the device list. It was not worth it because the loading time is very fast since we are fetching from our local server.

Creating and empty state when there are no devices returned

This is just creating a nice message saying there are no devices to display

Documenting the code

Specially React components.