Customer Demo UI

Requirements

Provide an application that allows a company to see their customer information.

Customers have the following information associated with them:

• Unique customer identifier.
• Status: one of "prospective", "current" or "non-active".
• Creation date and time.
• General information like name and contact details.

The company can also make notes for each customer. A customer can have any number of notes associated with them.

The user should be able to:

• Filter and sort the list of customers.
• Click on a customer in the list to view their details and add/edit notes for that customer.
• Change their status.

Notes

1. Construct a full-stack application with a browser user interface and data store.
2. You may use any programming languages, data store and frameworks you want.
3. A user interface for editing customer details other than their status and the notes is not required.
4. Think about all of the supporting code you may need for a professionally-built application.

Implementation details

This has been set up as Spring Boot MVC + Hibernate. The back end provides a REST API to get/add/update/delete customers and thier notes.

The front end is a single page application found in /resource/static/index.html. This uses JQuery and 3rd party open source table renderer Data Tables.

The application is built with Maven.

Build instructions

$ mvn clean package
$ java -jar target/customer-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

For demo purposes the application uses an in-memory database so there is no use for any other dependency installation or configuration.

The applications will genererate some random sample customer data on startup.

Once started the customer UI will be available at http://localhost:8080

Known Problems and Notes

• The Data Tables plugin is available under MIT licence which may not be acceptable to corporate clients.
• The front end uses very verbose JQuery - should consider modern framework i.e. React.
• Should check encoding post data - application is untested with special characters.
• Better error handling generally.
• More tests.
• Mismanagement of underlying data table representation vs what is shown on the browser/send to back end - this results in bugs around new notes:
  • Cannot delete new notes until the browser is refreshed.
  • Saving status causing new notes to be deleted unless the browser is refreshed first.
• Fix date and status formatting.
• Ensure when editing data the focus move to the form fields.
• A stand alone database such as Mysql will be needed.