This is a project from the Advanced Forms and Active Record section in The Odin Project's Ruby on Rails curriculum.
You can view this web app on Heroku. The heroku server will need a little bit of time to fire up a dyno, so please be patient with this free service.
This project is a fairly simple and straighforward app where a user books a 1-way flight. The focus of this project is getting more comfortable with Active Record and more advanced forms. It does not require any user authentication or authorization.
User Searches Flights: Users find flights based on the origin airport, destination airport, and the departure date. This feature required associations between the airports and flights, seeding the database, and building a form using pre-populated dropdowns.
User Pick A Flight: On the same page as the search, users select the flight that they would like to book. This feature required working with parameters and using a hidden field for the number of passengers.
User Enters Passenger Information:
Users enter passenger information to finalize their booking. This feature required Bookings to accept nested attributes for Passengers.
(Additional) RSpec Tests: The current Ruby on Rails curriculum does not cover testing, so I decided to learn testing before tackling this project. After trying several other resources, I read Rails 5 Test Prescriptions. Although the book is slightly outdated, it was very thorough and gave me the foundational knowledge that I was seeking.
(Additional) 2 Connecting Flights:
After finishing the bare bones of this project, I wanted to see if I could implement two connecting flights for long cross-country flights. This was quite a challenge at my skill level, but it was very rewarding to see it all come together. I created a service object, BookingOptions, to find the available flights. If a direct flight is less then 4 hours long, it will only return direct flights. However, if a direct flight is over 4 hours long, it will also look for connecting flights in a specific window of time. I used TDD to develop this feature, so it was perfect timing to utilize my new testing knowledge.
(Additional) Rake Tasks:
As I was wrapping up this project, I wanted to figure out a way to continually seed the database with flights in the future. The Odin Project's students look at other student's solutions, so I didn't want to this app to quit working in a month, three months, or even a year. I learned that I could create rake tasks and use Heroku Scheduler. In addition, I created another service object, FlightGenerator, that will be used by the seeds file and the rake task to generate flights.
(Additional) Styling: Although styling this project is not required, I wanted to add styling as a finishing touch. I decided to use vanilla CSS, instead of using a framework like I had in the past. I had the basic idea of using an light-colored inner area, with a darker "sky-like" gradient background. As I created this basic layout, I remembered the logo from Catch Me If You Can and was inspired to create a similar logo using Affinity Designer. This web app is responsive, using a combination of media queries and flexbox.
- Prerequisites: Rails, Git, and Bundler
- Clone this repo (instructions)
- Navigate into this project's directory
cd flight_booker - Install the required gems, by running
bundle install - Migrate the database, by running
rails db:migrate - Seed the database, by running
rails db:seed - Start the local server, by running
rails server - View
localhost:3000in a web browser
- To run the entire test suite, run
rspec - You can specify one spec folder to run a group tests, such as
rspec spec/features - You can specify one spec file to run a single set of tests, such as
rspec spec/models/flight_spec.rb