Save & Return API Service

Provides a service layer to read, create and delete reports from a SQL table.

Reading: The main application will make a request to this save-return-api service. This service will then connect to the database, get the data back and send it to the main application if it is successful

Saving: The main application will send the data to this service as an end point. This service will connect to a database and store that data and respond back to the main application if successful

Database connection

This repo uses ms-schema as default to connect to postgres. You could supply a different dependency to connect to a DB if you wanted to using the MIGRATIONS_REPO environmental variable. Ms-schema uses knex which, if NODE_ENV is not set, will try to connect to a localhost instance of postgres. If it is set, it will try to use the below environmental variables DB_HOST etc... to connect to a formal DB using the proper credentials.

Env Vars

You can set the following to specific how you want your results to look:

• SERVICE_TYPE - This specifies what service you are using the lookup UI for. The default is for the modern slavery service. But additional templates could be created which this drives.
• TABLE_NAME - This specifies the SQL table name you want to query. This defaults to 'reports'.
• CLIENT - This is the database client type. This defaults to postgresql.
• DB_HOST,DB_USER,DB_PASS,DB_NAME - These are production credentials for accessing the relevant database. These default to 'knex' for the user and password, and 'knex_session' for the database name. These are only for local development.
• MIGRATIONS_REPO - A migrations repository containing a knexfile for connecting to a DB. Default to ms-schema which may contain what you need. Test data contained that repo if you need it.

Local Setup

The migrations and seeds folders are used by knex to setup a local DB with dummy information for testing the service. These are not used in production where it is assumed a separate DB is setup for knex to connect to that is already setup.

Run the following commands to setup a test DB:

brew install postgres
brew services start postgresql
psql postgres
CREATE ROLE knex WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'knex';
ALTER ROLE knex WITH SUPERUSER;
CREATE DATABASE knex_session;
\q

If you download Postico for Mac (https://eggerapps.at/postico/), you can then inspect your postgres DB for example and look at the test entries inserted into the test table 'Reports'.

You then need to use a knexfile with migrations and seeds folders to populate your database. The ms-schema repo which is used for migrations in the Modern Slavery service (https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/ms-schema) can be used as a test example and is included in this project. You can run

yarn run db:setup

from that repo to setup your database.

Install & Run

The application can be run on your local machine

Dependencies

You will need to have the following installed:

Node JS ( LTS Erbium v14.x )

npm ( v6.x )

PostgreSQL ( v12.x )

Running the application

Ensure your database service is available and running.

Then to run the service use:

npm start to run the server.

With the server running you can run the main app with save and return lookup UI functionality. See details of how to do this in modern slavery application