job-hunter-ats

A convenient hub to apply for and post jobs effectively, decreasing the amount of time wasted that would normally be lost to the notoriously exhausting process of job hunting.

Important General Info (Read me first)

1. In order to run this project, you will need Visual Studio 2019 Community (hereafter referred to as VS). Any recent version should work.

   • You will need the ASP.NET package to run this project
   • After downloading VS and the above package(s), open the job-hunter-ats.sln project/solution in VS
   • Then, in VS, go to Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Manage Nuget Packages For Solution
   • If the packages listed under "ItemGroup" in job-hunter-ats.csproj have not already been installed, then install them.

2. To properly run the frontend, you will also need a recent version of NodeJS installed. When debugging from within VS, all required dependencies should be automatically installed.

   • The frontend is developed using NodeJS, React, and TypeScript.
   • The Material-UI library was also used extensively for its input components to build the forms.
   • The React Hook Form library was used to allow for easy development of forms using React's functional component pattern.
   • Axios was used to make all HTTP requests to the backend.

3. The database is sqlite

   • To download debugging tools for sqlite, go to https://www.sqlite.org/download.html (you will likely need this for development)
   • Download the command line shell program, sqldiff.exe program, and sqlite3_analyzer.exe program as these will come in handy later
   • You may want to download these to the same directory as the location where your sqlite database will be created

4. The database of this project is named "JobHunterDb.sqlite" and by default, it will be located in the root directory of the project. The location can be changed by changing the following code in job-hunter-ats\job-hunter-ats\Startup.cs

   public const string DBLocation = "Data Source='{DESIRED_LOCATION}'"

5. Upon initially opening the project or changing Git branches, you will need to set up the database.

   • This should be relatively straighforward, simply follow the Creating and Upgrading your Database instructions later in this document.

6. During development, each time you change any of the models (in job-hunter-ats\job-hunter-ats\Models), you will need to create a database migration.

   • A "Migration" is essentially an instruction that allows the database to automatically upgrade. Our project will end up having many migrations, which will be applied sequentially to create our full, up-to-date database. To learn more, go to the Updating Models and creating Migrations section.

7. Some sample data already exists in the SampleData.cs file in the job-hunter-ats\job-hunter-ats\Test directory, visit that file for an easy way to add sample data.

Running the Frontend

• In order for the frontend to run, a recent version of NodeJS should be installed.
• Upon debugging the project from within VS, the frontend should also be automatically started and hosted at http://localhost:5001.
• If VS fails to install npm dependencies or fails with an error relating to react-scripts not existing, open a terminal within the job-hunter-ats/ClientApp folder, and run the following command to manually update npm dependencies

  npm install

• The frontend requires the backend REST API in order to properly function, and will throw 404 errors if it is not found when making requests.
• The backend should be running locally on the same machine as the frontend.

Creating and Upgrading your Database

• Go to Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Package Manager Console, then enter command

  > Update-Database

  This will automatically create a database at the "DBLocation = "Data Source='{DESIRED_LOCATION}'" with the current models Note: In the sqlite command line tool, you may need to run the following commands upon initially creating the database to enable foreign key constraint enforcement:

  > .open JobHunterDB.sqlite
  > PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;

Updating Models and Creating Migrations

• Go to Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Package Manager Console, then enter the commands

  > Add-Migration Helpful-Migration-Name
  > Update-Database

• This will automatically create a migration for your database under job-hunter-ats\job-hunter-ats\Migrations (you will need to commit this file to Git)
• If you are updating the models/database schema, make sure to communicate with anyone else that is working on the database models, since working on multiple migrations simutaneously can cause requirement conflicts (and worse, these requirement conflicts do not show up as merge conflicts)

Some notes about Migrations:

• If you want a behaviour upon deletion other than Cascading deletion, then you need to manually go into the migration and change the "onDelete: ReferentialAction.*" to appropriate action

Reference for how to create new models

Seeding the Database

• There is a built-in route for seeding the database with dummy data. This route is only available when running the project in debug mode in VS.
• To seed the DB, first start the API in debug mode.
• Next, send a POST request to the following endpoint: https://localhost:5001/api/users/populatedb.
• If there are no entries in the DB, sample data will be added

Instructions for hitting API Endpoints

1. Download the Postman Desktop App
2. Sign in to the app (create an account if you haven't already)
3. Turn off SSL certificate verification via File > Settings > SSL Certificate Verification
   • Since the SSL certificate is local, it can't be verified. make sure to turn this setting back on if you are hitting public endpoints (we won't be for this project)
4. Run job_hunter_ats using the play button in the 2nd toolbar (beside "Any CPU"). If the button is not visible, you may have to switch to Solution View in the Solution Explorer. The project may take a minute or two to start up.
5. Enter the desired endpoint URL in Postman and add the authorization info (more info in the Authorizing Requests section)
6. Enter the relevant parameters in the body section of Postman. For example, the POST endpoint https://localhost:5001/api/companies requires information in the following form

{
    "companyid": 1,
    "name": "Test Company 1",
    "adminid": "admin-user"
}

7. Hit Send!
   • Note that since SSL certificate is turned off, you should see a "Warning: Unable to verify the first certificate" that you can ignore during development if the server is on your local machine (obviously don't ignore this if you are hitting non-local endpoints though)

Authorizing Requests

1. Upon startup, three roles will be created: Admin, Recruiter, and User (1.1. You can add some sample users to the roles via the instructions in the file in the job-hunter-ats\job-hunter-ats\Test\SampleData.cs files)
2. We are authenticating requests using Bearer Tokens. To get a bearer token, hit the endpoint api/auth/login with a request of the form:

{
    "username": "yourusername",
    "password": "yourpassword"
}

3. The endpoint will return a Bearer Token and its expiration date.
4. To use the bearer token in Postman, go to Authorization and select Bearer Token, then paste the bearer token
5. You can then make an API call as described in line 5 and beyond in Updating the Database Schema

Adding New Users

1. To add a new user, use the api/auth/register endpoint via Postman
2. The body of your request should be of the form:

{
    "username": "newusername",
    "password": "newpassword",
    "firstname": "newfirstname",
    "lastname": "newlastname"
}

3. The new user will automatically be created with the candidate role and a Bearer Token will be returned.

Note that there are several other functions in AuthController.cs that allow you to change user roles, test user validity, etc.

Troubleshooting

• If a webpage pops up but you get an error message saying that a table is missing or that a certain field of the table does not exist:

  • Your database schema may be out of data. Follow the Updating the Database Schema instructions in this document

• If the program is building but not running at all:

  • If you accidentally click in the cmd prompt (including the window that appears when starting this program) it will halt by default (Microsoft is very silly)

• If foreign keys not being enforced:

  • Open the sqlite command tool and run

    > .open JobHunterDB.sqlite
    > PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;

    Note: this will not enforce foreign key constraints on existing data, so you have to manually go back and fix any existing errors

Relevant links

• Hiding/protecting certain fields from items

• Entity relationships info

• Authentication in ASP.NET Web API

  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-api/overview/security/authentication-and-authorization-in-aspnet-web-api
  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-api/overview/security/individual-accounts-in-web-api

• Security if we decide to add a UI