This is the initial repository for the Electoral Register API. More information about the Electoral Register project, including architecture diagrams, can be found in the frontend repository.

This repo contains a draft API spec in swagger.yml. This isn't fully complete, but is intended to act as documentation for the intended direction of the API. It's intended that this API definition will evolve as the business logic becomes more clear. It can be viewed using any swagger renderer (eg an editor plugin, or by copying it into https://editor.swagger.io/)

At present this repository is a copy of https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/lbh-base-api, with renaming carried out, and DynamoDB code removed.

The rest of this readme is taken from the Base API, so will need adapting as development on this API continues.

• .NET Core as a web framework.
• nUnit as a test framework.

To serve the application, run it using your IDE of choice, we use Visual Studio CE and JetBrains Rider on Mac.

Note When running locally the appropriate database conneciton details are still needed.

For Postgres an approprate CONNECTION_STRING environment variable is needed, and if you want to use a local Postgres instance then that will of course need to be installed and running.

The application can also be served locally using docker:

1. Add you security credentials to AWS CLI.

$ aws configure

2. Log into AWS ECR.

$ aws ecr get-login --no-include-email

3. Build and serve the application. It will be available in the port 3000.

$ make build && make serve

We use a pull request workflow, where changes are made on a branch and approved by one or more other maintainers before the developer can merge into master branch.

Then we have an automated six step deployment process, which runs in CircleCI.

1. Automated tests (nUnit) are run to ensure the release is of good quality.
2. The application is deployed to development automatically, where we check our latest changes work well.
3. We manually confirm a staging deployment in the CircleCI workflow once we're happy with our changes in development.
4. The application is deployed to staging.
5. We manually confirm a production deployment in the CircleCI workflow once we're happy with our changes in staging.
6. The application is deployed to production.

Our staging and production environments are hosted by AWS. We would deploy to production per each feature/config merged into master branch.

To help with making changes to code easier to understand when being reviewed, we've added a PR template. When a new PR is created on a repo that uses this API template, the PR template will automatically fill in the Open a pull request description textbox. The PR author can edit and change the PR description using the template as a guide.

FxCop runs code analysis when the Solution is built.

Both the API and Test projects have been set up to treat all warnings from the code analysis as errors and therefore, fail the build.

However, we can select which errors to suppress by setting the severity of the responsible rule to none, e.g dotnet_analyzer_diagnostic.<Category-or-RuleId>.severity = none, within the .editorconfig file. Documentation on how to do this can be found here.

$ make test

To run database tests locally (e.g. via Visual Studio) and you are using Postgres the CONNECTION_STRING environment variable will need to be populated with:

Host=localhost;Database=testdb;Username=postgres;Password=mypassword"

Note: The Host name needs to be the name of the stub database docker-compose service, in order to run tests via Docker.

If changes to the database schema are made then the docker image for the database will have to be removed and recreated. The restart-db make command will do this for you.

• Use nUnit, FluentAssertions and Moq
• Always follow a TDD approach
• Tests should be independent of each other
• Gateway tests should interact with a real test instance of the database
• Test coverage should never go down
• All use cases should be covered by E2E tests
• Optimise when test run speed starts to hinder development
• Unit tests and E2E tests should run in CI
• Test database schemas should match up with production database schema
• Have integration tests which test from the PostgreSQL database to API Gateway

• Record failure logs
• Automated
• Reliable
• As close to real time as possible
• Observable monitoring in place
• Should not affect any existing databases