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https://github.com/gregmalcolm/making-movies

Exercise for building a nice frontend on top of a basic rails app
https://github.com/gregmalcolm/making-movies

Last synced: 29 days ago
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Exercise for building a nice frontend on top of a basic rails app

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README 

        
Making Movies

=============



Objective

---------



We have this a very mediocre rails app for viewing and editing a movies/actors

database. The front-end completely lacks pizazz. Your mission is to revamp the

front-end into something a bit more modern and make more use of javascript.



Suggestions

-----------



Feel free to change this app however you like. Keep in mind we want a

maintainable app though.



Some Things that you could try include:



* Better styling - Even a touch of Bootstrap would make a world of difference

* Search functionality - Searching for movies/actors is much better than just

  having them listed.

* Pagination - Currently we don't have enough data to need it, but when this

  application goes into production we're going to need it.

* Movie APIs - Hate the data we've provided? Well you can always hook

  up to another movie database via api. For example rottentomatoes.com has one.

* Jquery controls - You could manage the movie selections using a

  nice jquery autocomplete control like Select2 or Selectize. Or maybe a nice

  date picker.

* Implement "Add cast members" to movies edit page. You'll probably have to add

  a rails controller action in MoviesController to make this work. You can append

  actors by doing this:

    ```@movie.actor << actor```

* Include movie images

* If you have experience with writing single page javascript apps, making the

  movies page or the actors page a single page app could work well. If you take

  this path we recommend at the very last using some kind of template engine

  (eg moustache, handlebars, etc). HTML in javascript string form is never

  pleasant to maintain...



Getting setup

-------------



* Install ruby



```

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

```



* Install bundler



```

gem install bundle

```



* Install gems using bundler



```

cd making-movies

bundle install

```



* Generate the sqlite database



```

rake db:migrate

rake db:setup

```



* Start a rails server



```

rails s

```



* The app is available at:



```

http://localhost:3000

```



Code walkthrough

----------------



Javascript libraries can easily be added by adding them to

apps/assets/javascripts. Similarly sass or css stylesheets can be added

to apps/assets/stylesheets.



Also you can add coffeescript/javascript files to the app/assets/javascripts

folder for use by the application pages.



All html for movies pages is rendered in the following places:



app/views/movies - For pages with /movies in the url

app/views/actors - For page with /actors in the url

app/views/home/index.html.erb - Start page



A couple of json_builders are in place that will create some json content:



http://localhost:3000/movies.json

http://localhost:3000/movies/1.json (json for record #1 'show' action)

http://localhost:3000/actors.json

http://localhost:3000/actors/1.json (json for record #1 'show' action)



@movies/@movie and @actors/actor objects are assembled in controller actions.

For example ActorController in app/controllers/actors_controller.rb uses index

method to assemble data for the index url action, show for actors/1 and edit

for actors/1/edit. Check the routes for more details of which actions are used

for which action:



http://localhost:3000/dev/routes



For more detail, check the documentation on the Rails website:



http://guides.rubyonrails.org/