Video Store Consumer

In this project, you'll take a lot of the knowledge you have so far and create an end-to-end Video Store application. The final product will be something that a rental store employee might use to manage the video store where they work.

This is a Phase 3 Pair project.

Learning Goals

• Leverage jQuery event observation along with Backbone to enable a dynamic user interface
• Organize browser interactions according to Backbone's MVC pattern
• Revisit Rails API functionality
• Practice project management skills in prioritizing features and determining deliverables

This project has two main components: a Rails API and a Backbone front-end. You will be extending an existing Rails API to add some of the functionality that you require to complete the front-end implementation. You will be submitting a pull request at the end of the project for both components.

Problem Statement

Our rental store employees want to be able to manage their rental inventory. They want to be able to search through all movies and pick and choose which movies they want to add to their rental library. They want to be able to manage their rental library. We will be using an external API to build in searching for all movies. We will use our existing Rails API to manage the rental library.

Project Information

This project will be utilizing an external API within an API! Whoa! Your front-end implementation will be interacting with a Rails API that you will be modifying. The Rails API wraps an external API which contains many endpoints related to movies. The external API is The Movie DB.

Project Setup

1. Backbone Part

• One person shall fork this repository
• Add the pair as a collaborator on the project
• Both people shall clone the repository
• Install dependencies using $npm install
• Start the development server using $npm start

2. API Configuration

• Follow the instructions on the API's Getting Started page to set up your account and request an API Key.
  (You can use Ada's address in the registration process)
• Read through the documentation for the API. A few endpoints you may want to explore include:
  • Search Movies
  • Get Movie Details
  • Configuration

3. Rails Part

• One person shall fork the API repository. You can find it at your cohort's GitHub org, and the project's name is VideoStoreConsumer-API. You should immediately notice that this is a Rails project not a Backbone project.
• Add the pair as a collaborator on the project
• Both people shall clone the repository
• Set up the .env file with the API key from step #2
• Set up the DB
• Ensure both people can run the API locally

Project Requirements

Front-End

• Rental store employee should be able to:
  • search all Movies
    • add a movie to the rental library
  • list all movies in the rental library

Back-End

• The search functionality is already implemented!
• Add support for adding an external movie to the rental library

Project Design

Front-End

• Consider what Backbone models, collections and views you will need to utilize
• Consider what events you will want to handle
• Consider how you will make requests from the front-end to the API

Back-End

• Investigate the existing implementation to gain an understanding of what you are working with
• Consider what data the back-end will require to complete the tasks in the requirements

Optional Enhancements

Some of these optional requirements require work in the front-end only, back-end only or both.

• Rental!
  • Check out: Select a movie along with a customer to create a rental
  • Check in: Select a customer to see the movies they have checked out. Select a single (or multiple) rentals to check back in
  • See all overdue rentals
• CRUD customers
• Introduce scrolling pagination to dynamically load more movies when scrolling to the bottom (research!!)

Resources

Note, you may need to use non restful API calls for rentals and this can be done by overriding Backbone.sync. Below are some resources on how to do so.

• Overriding Backbone.sync for non-RESTful APIs
• Non-RESTful backend with Backbonejs