Tech debt | Null handling for db queries in activity methods

[Behold3th]

Currently, we perform validation on the status of a bounty by checking for the correct status in our validation module. If we don't find the correct status, we serve an error message to the user detailing that the bounty is not in the expected status for that activity.

e.g,

    if (dbBountyResult.status && dbBountyResult.status !== BountyStatus.open) {
        throw new ValidationError(
            `The bounty id you have selected is in status ${dbBountyResult.status}\n` +
            `Currently, only bounties with status ${BountyStatus.open} can be applied for.\n` +
            `Please reach out to your favorite Bounty Board representative with any questions!`
            );
    }

By the time the bounty has made it to the activity, a few ms have passed. It's possible, though very very improbable, that the bounty status has been updated in that time by the web client. Thus in the activity, we add status as a field to our queries, so that a null result is returned if the bounty is not longer in the state we expect. This causes a Runtime exception, and the user is served a "Sorry, something isn't working and our devs are looking into it" error message.

e.g,

const getDbHandler = async (request: SubmitRequest): Promise<{dbBountyResult: BountyCollection, bountyChannel: string}> => {
    const db: Db = await MongoDbUtils.connect('bountyboard');
	const bountyCollection = db.collection('bounties');
    const customerCollection = db.collection('customers');

	const dbBountyResult: BountyCollection = await bountyCollection.findOne({
		_id: new mongo.ObjectId(request.bountyId),
		status: BountyStatus.in_progress,
	});

A better UX would be to serve a validation exception (as that is the actual cause of why the activity can't proceed). This needs to be implemented for all of our activities.