API Wars

Story

Because you are so awesome, a golden humanoid droid wants to meet you in the nearest Kantina....

Watch this intro!

Your task is to create a web application which shows data about the Star Wars universe, store visitor preferences with cookies and handle user login with sessions.

What are you going to learn?

• create a Flask backend project
• use routes with Flask
• use Bootstrap
• simple queries in SQL
• use AJAX for API requests
• session handling
• store passwords

Tasks

1. Create a web server rendering a page that shows a table with all the planets in the Star Wars universe.

   • The opening page of the website (/) shows data of 10 planets
   • The page has an HTML <table> element containing the data
   • The columns of the table are name, diameter (shown in km), climate, terrain, surface water (shown as percentage), population (formatted as 1,000,000 people)
   • The column titles are proper table headers
   • The page follows this basic design:
   • There's a next button above the table, clicking that shows the next 10 planets, if any
   • There's a previous button above the table, clicking that shows the previous 10 planets, if any
   • Double clicking on the next or previous buttons shows the next/previous 10 planets only once
   • Unknown values for surface water percentage and population are stated clearly and without any suffix (e.g for planet Coruscant and Hoth)

2. Display a button in each row if the planet has residents. These buttons should open a modal, populate its data containing the list of residents with more detailed information.

   • In the planet table there is a button in each row in a new column showing the planet's number of residents if the planet has any, otherwise the No known residents text is shown
   • Clicking the <n> residents button in the planet table, a modal shows up showing all the residents of that planet (every time)
   • The modal has an HTML <table> element containing the data
   • The columns of the table are name, height (shown in meters), mass (shown in kg), skin color, hair color, eye color, birth year, gender (an icon representation)
   • Data is loaded into the table without page refresh (with AJAX)
   • There is an X icon in the top right corner and a Close button in the bottom right corner; clicking these closes the modal
   • The modal follows this basic design:

3. Create a simple user login system with registration page, login page and logout link in the header.

   • There is a link in the header that leads to the registration page
   • On the registration page (/register route) the visitor can create a username/password pair that gets stored in the database
   • Password storage and retrieval uses salted password hashing for maximum security
   • If either field is empty while clicking on the Submit button on the registration page the Please, fill in both fields. error message appears
   • If the username field contains a username that already exists in the database while clicking on the Submit button on the registration page the Username already exists, please choose another one! error message appears
   • On successful registration the Successful registration. Log in to continue. text is shown and the user is redirected to the login page
   • There is a link in the header that leads to the login page
   • On the login page (/login route) the visitor can log in using the username/password previously created during registration
   • If the username/password pair doesn't match while clicking on the Submit button on the login page the Wrong username or password. error message appears
   • After logging in, the username is displayed in the top right corner with the text Signed in as <username> and a logout link is shown in the header
   • Clicking the logout link (/logout route) logs the user out

4. [OPTIONAL] If the user is logged in, display a button in each row with which the logged in user can vote on a planet. Save this vote in a database and inform a user that the vote has been saved.

   • If the user is logged in, a Vote button is displayed in the planet table in a new column
   • Clicking the vote button saves the vote in the database without refreshing the page (with AJAX)
   • If the save is successful after clicking the vote button, the Voted on planet <planetname> successfully. message appears
   • If the save is failed after clicking the vote button, the There was an error during voting on planet <planetname>. error message appears
   • Users can vote on unlimited number of planets and with unlimited number of votes on a planet

5. [OPTIONAL] Create a new modal window accessible from the main page where you display the statistics about voted planets.

   • There is a link in the header that opens a modal showing voting statistics based on the user votes saved in the database
   • The modal has an HTML <table> element containing the data
   • The columns of the table are Planet name, Received votes
   • Data is loaded into the table without page refresh (with AJAX)
   • There is an X icon in the top right corner and a Close button in the bottom right corner; clicking these closes the modal
   • The modal follows this basic design:

6. [OPTIONAL] Do some improvements in order to make the web application easier to use.

   • Planet list is showing a loading indicator while the content is loading
   • Planet list navigation gets disabled while the requested data is loading
   • Residents modal is showing a loading indicator while the content is loading
   • Residents modal is not showing the table's header until the content is loaded
   • A nice background image is used, that fits nicely to the site and does not draw your attention out from actual content
   • If a UI framework is used (Bootstrap, Material-UI, etc), the default theme is personalized for the project and not just used without changes.

General requirements

• For the whole assignment, get the data using The Star Wars API
• The page doesn't show a server error anytime during the review

Hints

• The starting repository is empty on purpose.

• Use Bootstrap, if you don't want to spend too much time with design.

• For displaying various (error) messages, you can use the flash function of Flask.

• Use Javascript modules for cleaner codebase.

• Use a <h1> tag for the page heading.

• Add buttons for navigating between chunks of data (loading all planets would take too much resources, so SWAPI implements a pagination. Just look into it's response, it has a next and a previous attribute).

• Use a bordered table to display the needed information.

• You are not required to use AJAX for the base page data. If you like, you can use the back-end for parts of the data processing (like the planet list), BUT the modal windows must load by calling an API with AJAX. This API can be SWAPI directly, or you can write a proxy in your web-server. When using Bootstrap, the "Varying modal content based on trigger button" section of the Bootstrap documentation might help a lot.

• For the login system use sessions.

• For sending data from server side to client side with AJAX, it is advised to use JSON.

• You are advised to use a data schema based on this for the login system and voting tasks:

  • users table
    • id : serial, primary key
    • username : unique name for users - varchar
    • password : hashed password - varchar
  • planet-votes table
    • id : serial, primary key
    • planet_id : integer (id from SWAPI data)
    • planet_name : varchar
    • user_id : integer, foreign_key
    • submission_time : datetime

Starting your project

Background materials

• The last missing piece: API
• RESTful
• Front-End Frameworks and Libraries (including Bootstrap)
• A web-framework for Python: Flask
• Flask documentation (the Quickstart gives a good overview)
• Creating DOM elements
• JavaScript modules
• Sessions
• Salted password hashing functions in Werkzeug
• Web storage mechanisms
• Database glossary
• Flask's jsonify function