Welcome to the Academic Reference Manager WEB API! This API stores information about a library of articles, journals and publications. With it, you can manage loans of publications to friends and friends' reviews of the publications.

If you don't have Dotnet 2.2 installed on your computer you can download it here: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download

Be sure you select the correct OS for your computer and to select version 2.2, as the server won´t run otherwise.

If you want to run the scripts in the scripts folder, you will need python 3. https://www.python.org/downloads/

Again, make sure to select the correct OS.

Once you have Dotnet installed on your computer you can change directory to AcademicReferenceManager.WebApi and run the command:

dotnet run

to start the server.

Once the server has started, you can see all the commands available by navigating to the base URL (default is localhost:5000) in your browser of choice.

To run tests, go back to the root project folder and change directory to AcademicReferenceManager.Tests and run:

dotnet test

in either the IntegrationTests or UnitTests folder in order to run integration and unit tests respectively.

The system is roughly broken down into 3 subsystems

Handles routing from clients to the API. Handles authorization and model validation.

Splits complex calls from the controllers into 4 specific groups; publications, users, reviews and loans to simplify calls to the repository. Also handles mapping between entities and data transfer objects.

Handles reading and writing entities from the server to an sqlite database.

The API also supports 3 levels of authorization.

Have full create, read, update and delete (CRUD) access to the entire API, being able to add publications and users as well as being able view reports at the /users and /publications base routes (see Reports for more information). Add value admin to the Authorization header of your API call to authorize as administrator.

Have full access to commands under the route /users/{userId}. That is, borrow and return publications, add or remove reviews for publications and view recommendations of publications based on rating. Add value auth to the Authorization header of your API call to authorize as administrator.

Can view list of publications and their reviews.

Administrators can get a list of users and publications that have had an ongoing loan for a specified duration at a specified point in time. To do this, add one or both of the query parameters LoanDate and LoanDuration to the URL of your API call. e.g.

/api/publications?LoanDuration=20&LoanDate=2017-05-06

Our intent was to create a server that is as loosely coupled as possible as that would allow us to test the server more easily. To do this, we utilized seperated interfaces to avoid controller dependency on actual implementation and stub services for testing. .Net core is built with good support for inversion of control by having native implementations of transients and singletons, which also helped keeping the code loosely coupled.