API Development and Documentation Final Project

Trivia App

Udacity is invested in creating bonding experiences for its employees and students. A bunch of team members got the idea to hold trivia on a regular basis and created a webpage to manage the trivia app and play the game. That's where you come in! Help them finish the trivia app so they can start holding trivia and seeing who's the most knowledgeable of the bunch. The application must:

1. Display questions - both all questions and by category. Questions should show the question, category, and difficulty rating by default and can show/hide the answer.
2. Delete questions.
3. Add questions and require that they include the question and answer text.
4. Search for questions based on a text query string.
5. Play the quiz game, randomizing either all questions or within a specific category.

Requirements

To run this project, you must have these tools installed:

• Python3
• Pip
• NodeJs (npm)
• Postgresql

Besides these tools, other necessary tools will be automatically installed by using

pip install -r requirements.txt

Backend

After installing the packages, the backend can be started by configuring the application environment and running it using the following commands:

set FLASK_APP=flaskr
set FLASK_DEBUG=true
flask run 

These commands will direct the application to use the init.py in flaskr folder.

The application run on http://127.0.0.1:5000/

Frontend

Before using the frontend, is recommended to configure the backend first. To start the frontend, run the following commands:

npm install
npm start

This will start the server by default at http://localhost:3000/

API Documentation

Endpoints and behaviors

GET '/categories'

• Fetches a dictionary of categories in which the keys are the ids and the value is the corresponding string of the category
• Request Arguments: None
• Returns: An object with a single key, categories, that contains an object of id: category_string key:value pairs.

{
  "categories": {
    "1": "Science",
    "2": "Art",
    "3": "Geography",
    "4": "History",
    "5": "Entertainment",
    "6": "Sports"
  }
}

---

GET '/questions?page=${integer}'

• Fetches a paginated set of questions, a total number of questions, all categories and current category string.
• Request Arguments: page - integer
• Returns: An object with 10 paginated questions, total questions, object including all categories, and current category string

{
  "questions": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "question": "This is a question",
      "answer": "This is an answer",
      "difficulty": 5,
      "category": 2
    }
  ],
  "totalQuestions": 100,
  "categories": {
    "1": "Science",
    "2": "Art",
    "3": "Geography",
    "4": "History",
    "5": "Entertainment",
    "6": "Sports"
  },
  "currentCategory": "History"
}

---

GET '/categories/${id}/questions'

• Fetches questions for a cateogry specified by id request argument
• Request Arguments: id - integer
• Returns: An object with questions for the specified category, total questions, and current category string

{
  "questions": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "question": "This is a question",
      "answer": "This is an answer",
      "difficulty": 5,
      "category": 4
    }
  ],
  "totalQuestions": 100,
  "currentCategory": "History"
}

---

DELETE '/questions/${id}'

• Deletes a specified question using the id of the question
• Request Arguments: id - integer
• Returns: Does not need to return anything besides the appropriate HTTP status code.

---

POST '/quizzes'

• Sends a post request in order to get the next question
• Request Body:

{
    "previous_questions": [1, 4, 20, 15],
    "quiz_category": "Art"
 }

• Returns: a single new question object

{
  "question": {
    "id": 1,
    "question": "This is a question",
    "answer": "This is an answer",
    "difficulty": 5,
    "category": 4
  }
}

---

POST '/questions'

• Sends a post request in order to add a new question
• Request Body:

{
  "question": "Heres a new question string",
  "answer": "Heres a new answer string",
  "difficulty": 1,
  "category": 3
}

• Returns: Does not return any new data

---

POST '/questions/search'

• Sends a post request in order to search for a specific question by search term
• Request Body:

{
  "searchTerm": "this is the term the user is looking for"
}

• Returns: any array of questions, a number of totalQuestions that met the search term and the current category string

{
  "questions": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "question": "This is a question",
      "answer": "This is an answer",
      "difficulty": 5,
      "category": 5
    }
  ],
  "totalQuestions": 100,
  "currentCategory": "Entertainment"
}

Error Handling

Errors will be return as JSON objects:

{
    "success": False,
    "error": 404,
    "message": "resource not found"
}

The types of errors are:

• 404: Resource Not Found
• 422: Unprocessable
• 400: Bad Request
• 405: Method Not Allowed
• 500: Server Error