Search Service

Currently being implemented for ChronoFactorem. May be expanded to other projects (Lex?) as well.

Uses Elasticsearch to index and search timetables and courses.

Setup

Create a .env file similar to .env.example and setup a Python virtual environment in the method of your choice:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

This project's Docker build system has two profiles as of now: dev and prod.

The Elasticsearch container is common to both profiles. There are chrono-dev and chrono-prod containers for the Flask backend that will be called by ChronoFactorem.

While the chrono-dev container runs the Flask backend directly in debug mode, the chrono-prod container uses Gunicorn as a WSGI server to run the Flask app.

Both projects' Docker build systems are configured to be on the same network (called chrono_net), with ChronoFactorem serving as the "owner" of the network. This means that ChronoFactorem must be started first for the networking to be setup properly (despite this leading to an awkward workflow for ingestion).

elasticsearch_setup.py creates indices for courses and timetables and app.py starts the Flask server.

Courses and timetables can be added to the index using the API endpoints. A simple script to add all courses through these endpoints is in utils.py, which should be run locally.

API Endpoints

Endpoint	URL	Method	Query Parameters	Request Body	Response
Courses
Search Course	/course/search	GET	query : str		200 OK: List of courses matching the query
			name : str
			code : str
			dept : str
			instructor : str (multiple values allowed)
			time : str (multiple values allowed, format: day:hour)
Add Course	/course/add	POST		JSON object containing the course details	201 Created: JSON object containing course details
Remove Course	/course/remove	DELETE		JSON object containing the course ID	204 No Content
Timetables
Search Timetable	/timetable/search	GET	query : str		200 OK: List of timetables matching the query
			from : int (used for pagination)
			year : int (1 to 5)
			name : str
			authorId : str (format: f20xxyyyy)
			acadYear : int
			semester : int
			degree : str (multiple values allowed)
			course : str (multiple values allowed)
			instructor : str (multiple values allowed)
Add Timetable	/timetable/add	POST		JSON object containing the timetable details	201 Created: JSON object containing timetable details
Remove Timetable	/timetable/remove	DELETE		JSON object containing the timetable ID	204 No Content