Reflection

What do you understand better after doing this project?

I'm a little better with Foundation. I'm still not where I want to be, but I tried to take this project as an opportunity to focus on styling and on Foundation in particular. I also spent a lot of time focusing on responsive styling and trying to do the design in a mobile-first mindset. Again, I still need more practice but think I have a better understanding of how to think about a website so it looks good on a phone (and OK on desktop too).

What do you want more practice with?

I would like more practice understanding when it's advisable to store results from an API vs. when it's better to simply make a number of requests and not store data. I ended up going in the direction of making many calls and not storing any data, but I'm not sure this was the best solution. It would be helpful to have some discussion of the tradeoffs (or even usage rights - can we store recipes ourselves? What are the rules?) involved in storing data vs. making new calls and some types of strategies for minimizing both calls and data storage.

What is something you saw done differently?

One thing I loved about Sassa's site (and that I'd wanted to do in mine, but ran out of time for) was having a search box in the header. My site only had a search box on the front page, and you could navigate to the front page from any page by clicking on the title, but I think including the box in the header would be much better in terms of ease of use.

Recipe API Consumer

Learning Goals:

• Configure an API for consumption
• Create authenticated API requests using HTTParty
• Consume JSON responses from an API
• Map response to application-specific data
• Separate API logic from application logic

Purpose

Create a web application that will display recipes based on a search term. We will utilize an API from Edamam called the Recipe Search API.

Baseline

Before you start writing any code:

• Explore the API documentation to become familiar with the request(s) you can make
• If desired, create a Trello board to manage tasks

Once you've explored the API docs, this project:

• requires an individual branch and fork
• Use better_errors for debugging purposes
• requires you to create a Rails application
  • conform to Rails conventions on naming and inflection
  • by using rails new . you will create a new rails app inside of the fork folder instead of creating a new folder for your rails app

You shall submit a pull request with a meaningful pull request description once you are done with the baseline which shall be merged before moving onto implementing the requirements. Do not push any additional code until your baseline PR has been merged

Detailed Requirements

Search:

• The user shall type in a search term that will:
  • Make a request to the API using the search term
  • Display the results in a list to the user

List View:

• This shall show a paged list of recipes for a given search term, ten at a time
• This view shall show the name of the recipe and the corresponding photo
• The view shall have a link from the recipe to a recipe show view

Show View:

• This shall show the details about a given recipe. These details include:
  • Name
  • Link to the original recipe (opens in a new tab)
  • Ingredients
  • Dietary information

Additional Requirements:

• One of the things that permits us to use this API, it providing attibution to the API's created. We must provide this somewhere on our site. Example locations include the footer or an about page.
  • Examples from the API site
• You must also create tests for your API Wrapper & any classes as well as controller tests using VCR
• Your site must have a responsive look and feel, use semantic HTML as well as any grid formatting using Zurb Foundation

Important Notes:

• Using this API as a developer limits the number of API calls in a month to 5000. This means that we must try to minimize API calls for testing purposes as much as possible, to ensure you do not exceed this number of API calls in the one week of development we have.

Optional Requirements:

• Keep track of most recent search terms and allow user's to return to those searches
• Implement an OAuth strategy using Google
  • Allow users to save recipes to a "favorites" section that they can return to
• Provide checkboxes or other controls to limit the search to options such as:
  • Peanut Free
  • Soy Free
  • High Protein
  • Etc