Rachio_Challenge.md

Flow:

1. Hits Site Controller, which calls the index action and fires App Component of React
2. Upon Component did mount, fires off AJAX call to API/V1/DataController
   • Instantiates RachioService
   • calls store_data
     • retrieves user_id info
     • retrieves devices
     • retreives device_zones
3. After data is loaded into the database, promises call getZones and getDevices and sets State

React Components:

• App: Contains all state and handles all AJAX calls
  • Device: Preloader until database is loaded and app receives device in state
    • All Zones: Once state has a zones object, it maps and passes a single zone to the zone component
      • Zone: Displays zone data including name, previous watering duration and date
        • WateringForm:
          • sets initial state specific to the form
          • captures zoneData from form
          • fires waterZone and passes zoneData to the AJAX call at the App level
          • changes state of watering to true, renders "Watering Zone for X minutes" instead

Notes & Challenges

• Striking the balance between a scalable design and overdesigning
  • Example - No need for users in the database at this point, but it would be beneficial to have ActiveRecord Relations in the future, ie: current_user.devices.zones.all
  • Could make an AJAX call with headers and save everything in state from React without a Rails backend
    • no testing
    • not as scalable
• Tracing the flow of the application is fairly complex, and I think it could be more simple.
• Data doesn't persist, but Firebase / local storage seemed overkill considering the intent was only to water
• Return data from the API seems finicky, especially the wateringDuration. Also, no way to check if the sprinkler is actually firing.
• Loading data at the appropriate time.
  • Solutions for to hold off mapping until data loads into state
• Not entirely sure how to format time of last watering. It seems like others may have been hitting the API with their duration formatted in minutes. I just want to prove that I hit Zone 3 on 5/18 at 2:15PM for 10 minutes (600 seconds).