Flight booker

• project from Odin to practice building nested forms

Functionalities

• Enter desired dates / airports and click “Search”
• Choose from among a list of eligible flights
• Enter passenger information for all passengers
• Enter billing information

Extra flair: Stripe

I integrated a dummy Stripe payment processor. Since I don't have a private API key, the payment never really goes through, and no transactions ever happen.

However, Stripe's latest documentation isn't very rails-friendly. It's mostly handled in JavaScript. I created a Charge model, which has one Booking.

In the previous edition, Stripe decides to have a stand along HTML webpage in the checkout stage. Everything (e.g. styling) no longer applies if you follow their set up. I went into app/views/layouts/charges.html.erb and changed the meta tags. I also got rid of their old Javascript event listener after clicking on submit payment. Instead, it redirects locally.

Lessons learned

Multiple foreign key dependencies

-> indicates belongs_to:

flight & passenger -> booking -> Stripe charge

I learned to use hidden field, permitting foreign attributes and passing arguments into other controllers' actions and views.

Nested form

In order to submit passenger under booking, we need to prepare the #new of Booking to be ready to create passengers.

    @booking.flight = Flight.find(params[:booking][:flight_id])
    @booking.passengers.build # <--- I missed this! Took me forever to figure out!!

DateTime, Date, Time

1. storage I initially decided to store to separate columns in Flight instead of just DateTime. Then, in order to generate more flights in db:seed with Faker, it's impossible to store them separately.

I merged then, and re-migrated my databases.

2. Query

The user only selects available dates, not the exact departure time down to minutes. This form then only sends the date portion of the DateTime object to the active record query.

I had a very hacky line for this. flights = Flight.where('takeoff <= ? and takeoff >= ?', search[:takeoff] + ' 23:59:59 +0000',search[:takeoff] + ' 00:00:00 +0000')

I know, it's terrible... I manually concatenated a string to query for anything from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 on a given day. This is hard to read, and extremely prone to typos and bugs. I turned to Odin's community for help, and now I'm using Flight.where(takeoff: Date.parse(search[:takeoff]).all_day).

Webpack for front end

Previously, I installed Bulma from rails gem. Following the latest trend of JS controlled front end, I tried to use yarn instead of gem to install Bulma. This also means that I'm applying webpack instead of Rails' asset pipeline.

My notes on webpack here

Future

• Obfuscate the web query URL. I can't figure out how to render a query /flights?flight[from_airport_id]=8 as //flights?flight[from_airport]=SFO. It can't be good to expose your internal DB setup.