Ecommerce Coding Challenge

Here is a coding challenge I recently completed using Python/django/mysql. I used some SQL where django's ORM proved difficult to wrangle for the desired output. I produced a very bare bones ecommerce app with the following features:

• Backend/data models:

  • Customers can place orders for many products
  • Products and categories have a many-to-many relationship
  • Orders can have a status

• Reporting:

  • Endpoint url api/customers/orders/[customerId] returns all orders for a customer
  • Endpoint url api/reporting/products/sales?startdate=[startdate]&enddate=[enddate]&interval=[interval] produces a report of product sales over a given period (date format MM-DD-YYYY) by a specified interval (options: day, week, month)
  • Both return JSON

• Tests:

  • Unit tests test that urls produce the desired results, that the data model works as expected, and that logic works as expected
  • I wrote some scripts that generate about a dozen randomized orders for about half a dozen customers so that I could validate reporting outputs without having to hard code a bunch of data.

It was a fun challenge. Needless to say, there are many things I would improve if I kept working this, including:

• better urls/views structure within the project
• unittests that only use assert once
• security
• exception handling and checking that values provided by a user are valid and not malicious
• possibly using stored procedures and making sure that values sent directly into sql syntax are not sql injection attempts