Mandrilled

Mandrilled is a simple application for accepting and displaying Mandrill analytics event data.

It has one endpoint for receiving data /events that expects to receive a post containing Address, EmailType, Event and Timestamp (unix) parameters.

It has another endpoint for displaying data /dashboard, also found at the root path. Here you can also filter by date.

Finally you can view real time events here /real_time_events, there is a button to request dummy data sent by https://get-me-mandrill.herokuapp.com

Architecture

The application has a single persisted data type, an event. Events can be created by posting to /events as outlined above, they cannot be edited or destroyed.

Event data can be viewed on the dashboard. The dashboard is a singular resource found at /dashboard. One local variable is passed to dashboard#show, an instance of the DataMiner class. This object holds all of the logic relevant to querying event data and displaying it to the user.

Setup

The application is Ruby on Rail 5.1 backed by a Postgres DB. So install postgres, details here: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Detailed_installation_guides

Then

bundle exec rails db:create
bundle exec rails db:migrate

If you want some dummy sample data

bundle exec rails db:seed

Run the app

bundle exec rails s

Tests

Tests are RSpec, run them with

rspec

Simple Cov will tell you how much of the application is executed by the tests

rspec
open coverage/index.html

CI and automated review

The application is setup for CircleCI, and heroku auto deploys master on green

https://circleci.com/gh/timpwbaker/mandrilled

The application is also evaluated by Code Climate

https://codeclimate.com/github/timpwbaker/mandrilled

Todo

Some things to consider for the future:

• The mobile front end leaves much to be desired.
• It would be nice to have a real time event stream on the dashboard
• There is currently no belongs_to on events, it is one bucket. Dashboard is also a singular resource acting on all events. Fine for the purpose, but could limit future usage.
• This application would require some kind of auth in production.
• Currently events posted to the /events endpoint that cannot be successfully turned into Event objects and saved are silently discarded. In future it may be required to log these in some way.

Other considerations

I have used bootstrap for styles, just to get up and running, but this has been contained to one bootstrap_extraction file so could be replaced with another templating library relatively easily.

Charts on the dashboard are generated by Chart.js, which in turn requires jQuery. This is a relatively heavyweight dependency for such a basic application but its use has been restricted to one view partial, so it would be easy to switch out with another charting library, or remove completely, so I consider the risk to be low.

Events are built by instances of the EventBuilder class. I chose to extract this as the data coming in is not controlled by us, and could change (due to the mandrill API for example).