This repository was made for a technical assignment

Welcome to the Mandrill Listener repository!

This is a simple listener that will listen for Mandrill events and then store them in a database.

• No authentication is required to view the events, permission classes were not used but can be added if required.

Warning: This is not a production-ready application, you will need to follow Django's deployment checklist and set up environment variables & authentication before deployment.

How to run

1. Clone the repository
2. Create a virtual environment, on Windows: py -m venv venv
3. Activate the virtual environment, on Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
4. Install the requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
5. Navigate to the Listener folder: cd listener
6. Run the migrations: py manage.py migrate
7. Start the server: py manage.py runserver

Tools used

• Django - Python web framework, used Django REST Framework for the API
• Axios - Javascript library for making HTTP requests
• Vue CDN - Javascript framework, did not need to use the full Vue CLI
• Tailwind CDN - For quick and easy styling
• Django Channels - For sending notifications through the websockets
• SQLite 3 - To keep it simple, we can use PostgreSQL or MySQL in production.

JSONField

This project makes use of JSONField which is only supported in PostgreSQL and newer versions of SQLite & MySQL.

• We can switch to a generic TextField if the existing infrastructure does not support JSONField.

Redis

Currently using an in-memory cache for the notifications, redis can be used too but that would require Docker and would overcomplicate the task at hand. Would use redis in production.

Features

• Listens for Mandrill events
• Stores the events in a database
• Displays the events in a list on the frontend home page
• Can simulate responses from Mandrill using the API Endpoint /webhook/
• Sends a notification to all connected users when a new event with type open is received
• Used Django Channels to send the notifications through websockets
• It is possible to send notifications to other users as well through the same websocket connection
  • Currently simulated through the "Test" button on the home page

What I would add

• User authentication before they can view the events.
• Pagination for the events
• Mandrill's validation system to ensure that the events are coming from Mandrill.
• An error handling and logging system to store failed events and messages in a separate table.
• Database storage for the notifications that are sent to users, implemented asynchrnously.
• Automatically fetching new events from the database and displaying them on the frontend on notification.

Expected Mandrill Event Format:

{
   "mandrill_events":[
      {
         "event":"send",
         "msg":{
            "_id":"d1dasd12"
         }
      }
   ]
}

Current paths

By default the server will on 127.0.0.1:8000

• / - Home page - Displays the events & notifications
• /webhook/ - API Endpoint - GET - Provides a list of events
• /webhook/ - API Endpoint - POST - Receives events from Mandrill

If you want to test the API Endpoint, you can visit /webhook/ and scroll to the bottom for the ability to send Raw JSON data to the endpoint.