This application attempts to modelize a cat café, with cafés (called "bars" here), cats, and customers.
---
### REST API
Those three entities can be persisted via a REST API. They can also be updated, queried, and removed.
We used an ASP .NET Web API, with a Swagger configuration to visualize the interface.
---
### WebSocket
A WebSocket was set up to notify clients (who subscribe to it) whenever a Cat is `POST`ed.
@ -40,6 +44,7 @@ new WebSocket("wss://localhost:5003/gateway/ws").onmessage = function (event) {
- `"entity-created"` is a hard-coded event ID and should not be changed.
- you are free to change the content of the `Alert` itself, of course
---
### API type choices
#### REST API
@ -61,8 +66,11 @@ Since the connection is opened once and closed once, we avoid any performance lo
and closing a connection for each request-response cycle. Similarly, a server that uses a websocket
can reduce its load, because it is now pushing updates directly instead of being polled regularly by many clients.
---
### API Gateway
#### How to launch both projects
An [Ocelot](https://ocelot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) API Gateway manages the whole system.
It can be started using Visual Studio if you first right-click the cat-cafe.sln Solution, and go to Properties.
@ -155,6 +163,19 @@ The gateway uses rate limiting to make sure that clients cannot send an all-incl
}
} ...
```
---
## Testing the app
0. Prepare to use Postman
1. Start both the `cat_cafe` and `ApiGateway` projects (you may refer to [this procedure](#how-to-launch-both-projects)). Two browser windows will open, which you will not need to use much.
2. Use whichever browser window to open a WebSocket, so that you will get notifications (you may refer to [that procedure](#websocket))
3. In Postman, inside a workspace, click the `Import` button in the top left corner. Then click `Choose files` and find the collection to import in `docs/Cat Café.postman_collection.json`, in this repo. Follow the procedure to save it.
4. Keep an eye on the browser window you used to open a WebSocket, and execute the requests in this imported collection. When using `POST`, you should get an alert in the browser window.
Notice that the REST API and the WebSocket are accessed through our API Gateway.
In a real-life scenario, we could use IP-blocking or firewalls to ensure that port 7229 can only be accessed by the app itself and the gateway.
