Ticket Management System

A production-style Spring Boot REST API for managing application support tickets. This project was built to mirror common application support and middleware support workflows: tracking incidents, updating priorities, managing lifecycle states, validating user input, and logging backend operations for troubleshooting.

Why this project

This project was designed to understand back application development:

• diagnosing and resolving web application issues
• working with Java-based backend services
• using relational databases to store and retrieve operational data
• testing APIs and validating business logic
• documenting maintainable service behavior

Tech Stack

• Java 17
• Spring Boot 3
• Spring Web
• Spring Data JPA / Hibernate
• MySQL
• JUnit 5 + Mockito
• Postman
• GitHub Actions

Features

• Create support tickets
• Retrieve all tickets or get a ticket by ID
• Update ticket status and priority independently
• Filter tickets by status and/or priority
• Validate request payloads using Spring validation
• Return consistent API errors using centralized exception handling
• Log create, read, update, and delete operations for traceability
• Seed sample ticket data for quick testing
• Include unit tests and a Postman collection

Ticket Lifecycle

The application models a 3-stage support lifecycle:

• OPEN
• IN_PROGRESS
• RESOLVED

Priority levels:

• LOW
• MEDIUM
• HIGH

API Endpoints

Method	Endpoint	Description
POST	/api/tickets	Create a ticket
GET	/api/tickets	Retrieve all tickets
GET	/api/tickets/{id}	Retrieve a ticket by ID
PUT	/api/tickets/{id}/status	Update ticket status
PUT	/api/tickets/{id}/priority	Update ticket priority
DELETE	/api/tickets/{id}	Delete a ticket

Optional Filters

You can filter tickets using query parameters:

• GET /api/tickets?status=OPEN
• GET /api/tickets?priority=HIGH
• GET /api/tickets?status=IN_PROGRESS&priority=MEDIUM

Example Requests

Create Ticket

{
  "title": "Integration service timeout",
  "description": "Middleware service times out during downstream API call.",
  "priority": "HIGH"
}

Update Status

{
  "status": "RESOLVED"
}

Update Priority

{
  "priority": "LOW"
}

Example Response

{
  "id": 1,
  "title": "Integration service timeout",
  "description": "Middleware service times out during downstream API call.",
  "status": "OPEN",
  "priority": "HIGH",
  "createdAt": "2026-03-13T10:15:23.432",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-13T10:15:23.432"
}

Validation and Error Handling

This project includes:

• field-level validation for required inputs
• centralized error handling via @RestControllerAdvice
• a consistent JSON error response structure for invalid requests and missing resources

Example validation error shape:

{
  "timestamp": "2026-03-13T10:20:11.101",
  "status": 400,
  "error": "Bad Request",
  "message": "Validation failed",
  "validationErrors": {
    "title": "Title is required"
  }
}

Logging

Service operations log key application events such as:

• ticket creation
• ticket retrieval
• status changes
• priority changes
• deletion

This supports troubleshooting and mirrors the type of traceability expected in application support environments.

Testing

The project includes 11 unit tests covering:

• ticket creation
• retrieval by ID
• not-found behavior
• filter logic
• status update logic
• priority update logic
• delete behavior

Tests are implemented using JUnit 5 and Mockito.

How to Run Locally

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/your-username/ticket-management-system.git
cd ticket-management-system

2. Configure MySQL

Update src/main/resources/application.properties with your local MySQL credentials if needed:

spring.datasource.username=root
spring.datasource.password=password

Make sure MySQL is running locally.

3. Run the application

mvn spring-boot:run

The API will start on:

http://localhost:8080

4. Test with Postman

Import the collection from:

postman/Ticket-Management-System.postman_collection.json

Project Structure

src/main/java/com/example/ticketsystem
├── controller
├── dto
├── exception
├── model
├── repository
├── service
│   └── impl
└── TicketManagementSystemApplication.java

CI Pipeline

A basic GitHub Actions workflow is included to run Maven tests on pushes and pull requests.

Resume-Relevant Highlights

This repository supports claims such as:

• built 6 RESTful API endpoints for ticket workflows
• implemented a 3-stage incident lifecycle
• added validation and centralized exception handling across endpoints
• integrated structured logging for backend operations
• wrote 10+ unit tests for service-layer behavior

Future Improvements

• role-based authentication with Spring Security
• ticket assignment and comments
• Swagger / OpenAPI documentation
• pagination and sorting
• Dockerized local setup

License

This project is provided for educational and portfolio use.