Category: Open Source

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Open Source Costs to Expect website

I have decided to Open Source the Costs to Expect website.

I planned the website and the app for the service as a single app. Over time, I’ve concluded that although it may create additional work, it makes sense to separate the service app (app.costs-to-expect.com) from the public website (www.costs-to-expect.com).

Due to the limited requirements, the public website will never be an excellent showcase of the Costs to Expect service.

Until we decide I need help, I’m creating the Costs to Expect service by myself. Managing three apps is more involved than two; however, there are pluses to separating the products.

The public website is a minor part of the service; I have numerous features planned; however, they are much lower in priority than developing the app. I don’t want to be in a position whereby the website is restricting the development of the app.

For the next three to four months, I am moderately confident that I can develop the app and update the API without negatively affecting the website. I have request tests in place (thank you Postman) that will immediately notify me if I make any change to the API, which affects the website.

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API endpoints, filtering, sorting, searching, limiting and summarising

The Costs to Expect API is developing slowly; features get added as I need them, v1.15.0 is an exciting release, it will be the first time an endpoint in the API can be filtered, sorted, limited, searched and summarised.

I’ve written previously about summarising collections, with the release of search in v1.15.0 it makes send to describe all options supported by the items (/v1/resource-types/[resource-type]/resources/[resource]/items) collection on the Costs to Expect API.

By default, the items collection returns all child expenses in reverse chronological order, ‘all’ and ‘reverse chronological’ are sensible defaults; however, the API is limited if the collection always returns everything, you need to be able to filter, sort, limit, search and summarise.

The Costs to Expect API supports filtering, sorting, limiting and searching via parameters appended to the URI, collections are summarised by prepending /summary/ to the URI. Summary endpoints support the same filtering and searching options as their companion collections, limiting and sorting don’t make any sense in the context of a summary.

A URI can quickly become unreadable when multiple GET parameters are assigned, to attempt and improve readability I have grouped sorting and searching.

The OPTIONS requests for the Costs to Expect API detail all the supported GET parameters, in addition to giving an overview of each parameter, the OPTIONS requests list which fields and sortable and searchable. The sort and search parameters both allow multiple conditions.

Limiting a collection is handled as expected, there is an offset parameter to define the start record and a limit parameter to define the number of records requested.

Filtering a collection is handled via individual parameters, filtering is more common than searching and in my opinion needs to be the most verbose, when reviewing a URI the filtering parameters should be more visible.

This solution won’t work for everyone; however, if you need to support filtering, searching, sorting, limiting and summarising, I think it provides an excellent level or readability while still being practical.