Zendesk Ticket Viewer - Coding Challenge

Zendesk is a customer service tool that allows the creation and management of support tickets. This Application allows you to do the following features:

• Connect to Zendesk API using endpoints.
• Request the tickets for your account.
• Display them in a list.
• Display individual ticket details.
• Page through tickets when more than 25 are returned.

Installation Instruction

• Clone this repository: [email protected]:priyankamk/Zendesk_Ticket_Viewer.git to your local machine through the command line.
• Make sure all commands you give is run via bundle exec including things like rspec.
• Ensure you have version 2.6.2 of Ruby installed. For rbenv, if you run rbenv local 2.6.2 It should generate a file. To check git status just commit it in. It will generate a .ruby-version file.

Install Dependencies:

• cd into the repository and then run bundle install to install dependencies.

Run Server:

• Enter bundle exec ruby lib/controllers/ticket.rb to start the application.
• Open url in the browser - http://localhost:4567

Testing:

• To test the zendesk_api.rb run bundle exec rspec spec/models/zendesk_api_spec.rb

Build with

• Ruby
• Sinatra
• httparty
• Rspec
• WebMock
• rack-test
• Bootstrap

The Challenge

• The challenge is to create a customer service tool using Zendesk API calls by generating tickets to display.
• I have used RSpec and web mock to test the JSON request as I can create a dummy JSON response and test with the actual output.
• To add pagination and check out 1st page, last page, current page, next page and previous page.
• Exception error handling.

My Approach

• I used a pull request based approach to make changes. You can check my pull requests against this repo here https://github.com/priyankamk/Zendesk_Ticket_Viewer/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
• I decided to build a web-based application to make UI simple and easy to use. I chose to write the application with Ruby and Sinatra, as I felt the rails would do too much of 'Heavy Lifting' and also allow me to keep the application more lightweight and simplified.
• I am using HTTParty gem to make the API calls using Zendeskapi https://priyankamukundmk.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets and generate the tickets.
• I separated my concern’s inside lib folder and I tried to stick with object-oriented MVC design to keep my code neat and clean. In which ZendeskApi class deals with API calls and ticket controller displays the user interface.
• The Zendesk API returns 25 tickets per page - http://localhost:4567/tickets?page=1. I have accounted for having more tickets by making multiple API calls, I did that using postman but only making the request when the extra records are needed.
• Added pagination in which user can click next page, previous page, current page and last page.
• RSpec for happy path tests and webmock to test with actual JSON output.
• Experimented with exception handling, I researched and implemented basic error handling and display response message when an error occurs.(eg: when API being unavailable)

Learning

• For Sinatra Testing http://sinatrarb.com/testing.html
• For Exception handling - Basic understanding blog post about Error handling. https://stackify.com/web-api-error-handling/