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When writing the code test, please keep in mind best programming practices as well as proper coding style and the Drupal community’s PHP and JavaScript coding standards. Specifications

Write a small web application that allows end users to enter a Canadian postal code and view a list of political representatives associated with that postal code. Data should be pulled from the Open North Represent API (http://represent.opennorth.ca/api/). Representatives should be presented in a table or list ordered by ‘representative set’ (as found via the Represent API using this end point http://represent.opennorth.ca/postcodes).

[x] The implementation should be a small Drupal 9 module that implements Drupal’s form API. [] Include caching wherever applicable to improve the application’s performance. [] The code does not need to be perfect, but it should be considered production ready. We estimate this to take approximately 5 hours.

[x] All PHP, JavaScript, etc. needed to install, configure, and use the module or application. [x] Attach screenshots of the form. [x] Compress everything in a tarball or commit it to a github repo.

Overall, this coding challenge was a struggle for me. Having never used Drupal before, finding the resources and adapting them to the work that needed to be completed took a lot of work. As it currently exists, the app, when used within MAMP, can get and aggregate the representative data by postal code. The data is manipulated to group by representative sets, creating an object in which the representative sets are keys who's values are arrays of representatives that belong to those sets.

Day 1: The day started by trying to learn the basic concepts behind the Drupal framework and the reasons for its design. After a half day of consuming informational videos, docs, and tutorials, I began by setting my sites on getting a site using Drupal up and running. I originally set out to use Docker for hosting my server locally. Having other projects run on Docker, I am fairly comfortable using it to host severs locally. The docs recommended a tool called DDEV, which seemed like the right direction to be heading in, the tool's docs had a quick start guide for Drupal 9 -- documentation including caveats to this new version seem to be few and far between. After learning that Drupal gets installed after the server (duh) I had a server that was set up and ready to go. After going through the installer, I began learning about custom modules and started to create a skeleton of files I would want to use to fulfill the requirements. It looked like I would want a form that would extend the FormBase class. Cool.

Day 2: The next day, I followed the Hello World tutorial for creating custom modules. My plan was to iterate upon this simple custom module example: switching from a controller to a form, hooking up the form's submit to the opennorth API, collecting and grouping the data correctly, implementing a table to display the data, creating the cache and defining its conditions, and then if I had time, I would work on cosmetics. However, I discovered that after installing the custom module through the GUI, any attempt to access the new form endpoint would give a server error of 'Transport endpoint is not connected.' A couple hours were sunk into trying to debunk this before investigating another solution for local hosting. At this point, I switched to MAMP (and accidentally MAMP Pro for 30 minutes as the download page directed me there first 🤦‍♂️) and after a while, was successfully back up and running, with the ability to hit the form endpoint without error. The form was easily wired up to send out a request to the opennorth API using PHP's cURL and retrieving and regrouping the data by representative set was complete. The next challenge is where I still am currently. The form does not offer a way to render extra HTML, so I began to explore using blocks. This however did not use the form API as was instructed, so I had to return to using the form. An attempt to utilize themes ultimately proved nothing.

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