Coding Challenge: "Simple CSV Reader and CRUD API with Node.js"

Overview:

Welcome to your coding challenge!

Note: Feel free to use AI to generate the project! Understanding fundamental concepts is crucial as we are not assessing your Copy and Paste skills! Stand out, catch attention and comment honestly! Try to apply the rule, Stop using AI without knowing how to use AI, and leverage it's power to advance your project!

The goal is to read data from a CSV file, load it into an in-memory data structure, and expose a RESTful API to perform basic CRUD operations on the data. This challenge will help you get familiar with working with Node.js, Express and handling file operations.

Challenge Requirements:

1. Read Data from a CSV File:

   • You'll generate a CSV file named data.csv containing information about employees. The CSV file will have the following columns:
     • id (number, unique)
     • name (string)
     • email (string)
     • position (string)
     • salary (number)
   • Your application should read the contents of this file when the server starts and load the data into an in-memory data structure (e.g. an array). You may use a library like csv-parser to parse the CSV file.

2. Develop a RESTful API:

   • Create a RESTful API using Express to perform CRUD operations on the employee data, the API should support the following endpoint:
   • GET /employees: Retrieve a list of all employees e.g. http://localhost:5000/employees
   • Refer to https://www.freecodecamp.org/ to understand more about how CRUD works and how to expose endpoints.

3. Data Persistence:

   • Since this is a simple application, the data can remain in memory (e.g. stored in an array) and does not need to be persisted across server restarts.

4. Additional RESTful API endpoints (Optional):

   • Create a RESTful API using Node.js and Express to perform CRUD operations on the employee data. The API should support the following endpoints:
   • GET /employees/:id: Retrieve details of a specific employee by their ID

5. Data Validation (Optional):

   • Ensure the data is validated before performing any operations:
     • name should not be empty.
     • email should be a valid email format.
     • position should not be empty.
     • salary should be a positive number.
   • If validation fails, return a 400 Bad Request with an appropriate error message.

6. Unit Tests (Optional):

   • Jest is a JavaScript testing framework designed to ensure the correctness of any JavaScript codebase.
   • Refer to https://jestjs.io/docs/getting-started

Deliverables:

1. A working Node.js application that meets the requirements.
2. A README.md file explaining how to set up and run the project.
3. The data.csv file used for testing.

Getting Started:

1. Initialize a new Node.js project:

   • Create a new project folder e.g. internchallenge_myname
   • Change into the new project folder and run npm init to create a new Node.js project, and accept all other defaults during the prompting.
   • Install the necessary dependencies (express for the web framework and a CSV parsing library like csv-parser).
   • You do not need to install fs since this component is part of the Node.js framework.

2. Create an index.js File:

   • This will be the main entry point for your application.
   • Implement code using csv-paraser to read the data.csv file into an array, you can use console.log to ensure you have read the data correctly!
   • Implement code to set up the Express server to render the data to the frontend e.g. when http://localhost:5000 is called, it returns the data in JSON format.

3. Test Your Endpoints:

   • Use a tool like Postman or curl to test the REST API endpoints.

Sample data.csv Content:

id,name,email,position,salary
1,John Doe,[email protected],Software Engineer,75000
2,Jane Smith,[email protected],Project Manager,90000
3,Bob Johnson,[email protected],QA Tester,60000

Additional notes/links:

Notes:
Look at using nodemon to handle refreshing your app when you make changes.

Links:
https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager
https://www.npmjs.com/package/csv-parser
https://www.npmjs.com/package/express

Common Errors:

SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module
Solution: In package.json append "type": "module"

Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::5000
Solution: Edit your entry file e.g. index.js and change the port to a unique value

Error: ReferenceError: require is not defined in ES module scope, you can use import instead
Solution: Ensure the project package.json is updated with "type": "module", for example;

{
  "name": "internchallenge_myname",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "type": "module",
  ...

The module type forces your project to use import fs from 'fs'; instead of const fs = require('fs'); when consuming third-party libraries.

Submission:

• Create a GitHub repository for your code.
• Commit your code and share the repository link for review.

Good luck!