URL Shortenner

Starting The App and Downlaoing Dependencies

Mongo DB

This app uses MonogoDB to store records, you will need a MongoBD account. Add the following connection string to MONGO_DB_CONNECTION_STRING in ~/.env.local replacing the entities with your own details; "mongodb+srv://{username}:{password}@{your-cluster-url}/test?retryWrites=true&w=majority" If you wish to run MonogDB in docker for a more streamlined development experince, please add the URI to your local MongoDB instance. This proved helpful for devlopment of the application so far. Add the database name you would like to add records to under MONGO_DB_DATABASE in ~/.env.local. Add the API_BASE_URL to both ~/.env.local and ~/next.config.json to set the url to both the node environment and client environment respectivly.

Installing Dependencies

Run npm npm i at the root level of your app.

Application Scrit

• npm run dev: starts local instance of the application
• npm run test: runs all the tests suits

Further Enhancements

Form Validation

The form for entering urls currently just uses browser validation future enhancemnts could involve;

• none empty submissions
• checks to see if entered URL is already encrypted
• enhanced regex matcher

Loading Handlers

I have choosen not to process any laoding states in this application for simplicity but could impliment the following loading handling;

• disbale the 'generate' button while post request id running to avoid any issue with stacking requests.
• get exisiting URLs needs no laoding state as it is server side fetched

CSS

The CSS on the page is not perfect, this could do with some impromvemnt.

Tests

For timeboxing sake I have written a reduced unit test suite but in futire more unit test could be written. Coverage currently is not great.

using NextJs middleware for the establishing connection and getting db instance

Unfortunatley this was not easily possible inside NextJS middleware. Modules supported in middlewear can only contain ES modules and not use any native Node.js APIs. The MongoDB module unfortunalty leverages such prohibited APIs.