2018-11-28
in
2 min read
The last couple of days has been a lot of heavy effort of slogging through some ever increasingly complex changes to get the API going. I started with what I thought was going to have a relatively easy time with the notifications however the deeper I went into the more I realized that I either had to come up with some relatively (for me anyway) complex queries to populate some of the return types or I have to settle for some N+1 type query behaviors. “N+1 queries” are one where you pull the results one piece at a time. That’s fine for smaller data sets, like five or ten or something, but if you are dealing with hundreds of entries you are really thrashing your system. So I got about half way through the notifications API and then put it on the shelf and moved on to the API was dreading the most: Photos.
I was really psyching myself out about having to deal with the whole image file upload part of the Photos API and then the subsequent tie in with the Posts API. It shouldn’t be that complicated but these are things I had never done in Rails or with the Kotlin Fuel framework. How would they interact? How difficult would the security checks be? You get the idea. It did take several hours of figuring out what the current controller is doing and then how I wanted to refactor the more complicated operations into a service but I got there. Once I had that I had to test the whole aspect of limited posts et cetera, which I hadn’t done as well as I had thought previously. Thankfully my Ruby unit tests were solid I just had some hiccups in my test harness.
At the end of the day we have the Photos API and the Posts API working with the photos perfectly, to the point where I was able to make a fully populated post including with an image that was uploaded externally as well. That means I’m going to jump back on the Notifications API to wrap that up and all that’s left is the Search API.
In summary:
- Partial Progress on the Notifications API but shelved to figure out queries later
- Posts API is feature compleet with full tests
- Was able to create an entirely populated post with the respective images from scratch using an external application for the first time ever in Diaspora (see this post )
- 1.5 Endpoints left to go to be feature complete