IOET-ACME-Exercise

Hi ioeter's 😃 ! Here you can find all the information related to the proposed exercise for a trainee position.

1. Proposed Exercise 😳

The company ACME offers their employees the flexibility to work the hours they want. But due to some external circumstances they need to know what employees have been at the office within the same time frame

The goal of this exercise is to output a table containing pairs of employees and how often they have coincided in the office.

Input: the name of an employee and the schedule they worked, indicating the time and hours. This should be a .txt file with at least five sets of data. You can include the data from our examples below:

Example 1:

INPUT
RENE=MO10:00-12:00,TU10:00-12:00,TH01:00-03:00,SA14:00-18:00,SU20:00- 21:00
ASTRID=MO10:00-12:00,TH12:00-14:00,SU20:00-21:00
ANDRES=MO10:00-12:00,TH12:00-14:00,SU20:00-21:00

OUTPUT:
ASTRID-RENE: 2
ASTRID-ANDRES: 3
RENE-ANDRES: 2

Example 2:

INPUT:
RENE=MO10:15-12:00,TU10:00-12:00,TH13:00-13:15,SA14:00-18:00,SU20:00-21:00
ASTRID=MO10:00-12:00,TH12:00-14:00,SU20:00-21:00

OUTPUT:
RENE-ASTRID: 3

2. Overview of my solution 😏

My analysis of the solution was based on 5 key points:

1. Data Extraction Data extraction through a local txt file, can be done through functions given by the programming language.

2. Data Cleaning I performed a data cleaning, to avoid including unnecessary characters or blank spaces.

3. Data Separation The input format contains several special characters to separate the data, I analyzed what they are and how to separate them correctly.

4. Data Sorting Javascript is a programming language that handles JSON objects very well. My intention after separating the data is to sort them into an array of objects with their corresponding key and value.

5. Algorithm to compare employee schedules Finally, the algorithm was performed by comparing the schedule of an employee A, with an employee B, based on the day and time that have coincided.

3. Architecture 📐

I used the MVC architecture pattern as shown below.

In which the user, through the main method sends the txt file and requests the controller to process his file. The controller is responsible for performing the data cleansing and performs the algorithm process to get the result. The controller sends the result of the process to the view Finally, the view displays the result to the user.

Directory Tree

│   .gitignore
│   index.js
│   package-lock.json
│   package.json
│   README.md
│   
├───controllers
│       employeeController.js
│       
├───data
│       employee-entry-control-EXAMPLE1.txt
│       employee-entry-control-EXAMPLE2.txt
│       employee-entry-control.txt
│       
├───models
│       employeeModel.js
│       
├───test
│       test.js
│       
└───views
        employeeView.js

4. Aproach and Methodology 🔑

MVC was used because of its performance when carrying out object-oriented programming projects, since priority was given to the generation of objects of type Employee. Following the steps mentioned in the Overview of my solution, the methodology used in each step will be explained in a better way.

1. Data Extraction:

The readFileSync(filename, options) function of the language's own fs (file system) module was used. This function allows the extraction of text from the .txt file, and returns the content in a string

2. Data Cleaning:

Since there is a blank space in the first entry of the exercise, it was decided to check that no special characters other than those used to separate the string data are displayed. To control this, the regular expression was used:

    const regex = /[`~!@#$%^&*&*()_|+\;'".<>{{\Gi;

Together with javascript's replace() function, thus, removing unwanted characters.

3. Data Separation

We make a line break separation through the split("\n") function, another split for the "=" character, so we get the name. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the schedule is divided as follows

• Day: The first two characters of the string.
• Time: It is an array of the time of entry and exit of the employee, it is made from the first two characters extracted from the day.

4. Data Sorting

In this step, an object of type Employee is created for each line read from the string, where the index is assigned to the id, the first line to the name and the second line to the schedule.

Thus an array of Employees is obtained as follows:

[
  Employee {
    id: 0,
    name: 'ASTRID',
    schedule: [
  { day: 'MO', time: [ '10:00', '12:00' ] },
  { day: 'TH', time: [ '12:00', '14:00' ] },
  { day: 'SU', time: [ '20:00', '21:00\r' ]}]
  },
  Employee {
    id: 1,
    name: 'RENE',
    schedule: [
  { day: 'MO', time: [ '10:00', '12:00' ] },
  { day: 'TU', time: [ '10:00', '12:00' ] },
  { day: 'TH', time: [ '01:00', '03:00' ] },
  { day: 'SA', time: [ '14:00', '18:00' ] },
  { day: 'SU', time: [ '20:00', '21:00\r' ]}]
  },
 ...
]

5. Algorithm to compare employee schedules

To obtain the desired result, the path of two arrays is applied simultaneously, one will start from i+1 so that the name is not repeated.

Subsequently the schedules of each employee are traversed, the condition will be:

• Are both schedules on the same day?
• Are the working hours in the same interval?

That is, the first employee's entry time is less than or equal to the second employee's exit time and the first employee's exit time is greater than or equal to the second employee's entry time.

If it is fulfilled, the counter is updated by adding 1.

Once this process is finished, the values are assigned to the result, obtaining the desired OUTPUT.

5. How to run this project:question:

Make sure node & npm or yarn is installed on your system.

1. Open the folder in which you want to run your project

2. Open console

3. Clone this repo

   git clone https://github.com/jlgalarza3/IOET-ACME-Exercise.git

4. Change Directory

   cd .\IOET-ACME-Exercise\

5. Open on Visual Studio Code

   code .

6. Install Dependencies

Only the jest dependency will be installed for unit testing.

yarn install || npm install

7. Run Project

node .\index.js

8. Run Unit Tests

npm test

👉 Made with Javascript