Discitur Project

In the first sprint was making a simple controller that displayed the data in a lesson. The lesson is a entity composed of several sub-entities. The structure that I foresaw in front-end is:

• Lesson (title, school, classroom, content, rate, publishedOn, etc)
  • Author (name, surname, etc)
  • Good Practices List (lesson’s pro)
    • Good (description)
  • Bads Practices List (lesson’s cons)
    • Bads (description)
  • Tags List

For the approach defined in the Refining Cycle I developed the FE with the mock service, I checked with the PO the result and then I realized the back end. On Back-end side I found most suitable to provide a model (entity-table) providing for a single Entity/Table LessonFeedback to enter both the pros and cons of a lesson, differentiating through the “Nature” attribute of FeedBack

At Back-end side, my entity model is something like the following: 

• Lesson
  • Author (name, surname, email, userName, etc)
  • FeedBacks List
    • FeedBack (Nature, description)
  • Tags List

This approach and the scenario itself, in fact, is very common in a lot of enterprise scenarios, it happens that:

• there are separate groups for analysis and development of the FE and BE
• there is already a dictionary of services (SOA, REST, etc. ..) ready to use that return the data you need. None Back-end developer will make a copy of an existing service to give you back the structure that you expect on the FE. And it’s usually right.

I always find it useful and important, therefore, to mark a clear line of separation between FE and BE for a lot of reasons. That’s why, even without having to deal with remote systems, I like to implement DTO classes for transferring data from an Object Model services to the needs of the specific front-end.

In Angular, I realized all through the use of Services and Promises, below are some useful articles (beyond the official documentation):

• http://blog.brunoscopelliti.com/angularjs-promise-or-dealing-with-asynchronous-requests-in-angularjs
• http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2527-Defining-Instantiatable-Classes-In-The-AngularJS-Dependency-Injection-Framework.htm
• https://egghead.io/lessons/angularjs-chained-promises

 

That’s the code.

 

Now the controller becomes simple

 

and its template works on an Object Model decoupled from Back-End. 

 

This design has the advantage of reduce future reworks due to changes in the backend service that does not require changes to the user interface to just the LessonService code.