IWS Feature Requests application

A web application built with Flask

Tools Used

Below are the tools used for this project.

• Python 3.6.4
• Flask - the main web framework
• SqlAlchemy as an ORM for database operations
• MySQL - the main database
• Flask-Migrate for handling database migrations
• WTForms for form validation
• Jinja2 for templates
• gunicorn for serving
• Cleave.js for "cleaving" date
• Spectre minimalistic css framework
• Fabric3 for application deployment
• Also, some other interesting libraries for the proper engineering of the above

Project Description

This is a web application that allows requests for a new software feature that will be added onto an existing piece of software to be created and submitted - as tickets.

This application uses three main models:

• Request: This is the main model that the application is about. It contains the fields id (primary key), title, description (text field), client_id (foreign key to Client model), priority (integer field, will be unique for each client's feature requests), target_date (the desired date for this feature request) and product (foreign key to the ProductEnum model)
• Client: This is a simple model with a name that will be used to persist the clients that require the features
• ProductEnum: Another simple model similar to Client, will persist the product areas of each feature request.

Project Structure

This is a rather simple project. It has just one package (request) that contains everything:

• The __init__.py file contains the Flask app and database initialization.
• The forms.py has the definition of the Request form
• The models.py contains the ORM definition of the database tables
• The routes.py contains the definition of the various views that are used

There's also a template directory with the jinja2 templates and a static directory with a bunch of css and js files.

How to build and deploy the project

Set Up a Virtual Environment

pip3.6 install virtualenv

virtualenv chosenname

source ./chosenname/bin/activate

install requirements

pip3.6 install -r requirements.txt

Delete 'app.db in ./config folder, and delete entire ./migrations folder'

If you would like to use Sqlite3 for development, add something like

import os

basedir = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI='sqlite:///' + os.path.join(basedir, 'data.sqlite')

If you want to use mysql:

SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI='mysql+pymysql://user:pass@host/database'

export FLASK_APP=request.py

Create a new database, migrate and update the changes to your database with these commands below

flask db init flask db migrate flask db upgrade

Create 3 or more client objects

create sample client objects from your python shell, using the syntax below while creating the objects.

This should come in handy: http://flask-sqlalchemy.pocoo.org/2.3/quickstart/

client1 = Client(name='Client A')
.
.
.
client5 = Client(name='Client E')

then create requests for each clients from the main interface

Finally, you can run the server by running

flask run

Testing

The folder tests contains a file test_views.py which contains proper tests for all the views of the application. To run tests, just run the command below at the application root.

pytest

Demo

http://iws-britecore.herokuapp.com/

iws-feature-request