Because the app doesn't check whether dwCheckApi is online before sending a search, the user is left staring at a "Searching, please wait" message whilst it (dwCheckApi) spins up. This leads to a bad user experience, as all searches are very quick usually.

To get around this, send some kind of small request when any of the search screens loads. When dwCheckApi responds, enable the search controls. If there is no response, display a message to the user saying that functionality has been disabled (or something similar).

While waiting for a response from the server, display a "please wait" type message informing the user that they will have to wait.

Or send a fire and forget request on first load (from the server side code?), which will force dwCheckApi to spin up if it is closed.

Perhaps we need an API endpoint to call on dwCheckApi which will return a status enum (Started OK, Database Issue, +++Out of Cheese Error+++, etc.)

• Most of the data (for Books and Characters) is only present up to Jingo.

• There are only a few entries for Series data

• Reaper Man is missing cover art work

Description

The latest version of the ASP NET Core Angular template uses Angular 5, whereas this project uses Angular 4.2

Solution

Upgrade the project to use Angular 5

As of issue 11 on the API, the results are gzipped.

Ensure that the requests from Angular have the Accept-Header:gzip header set

Clicking on a book entry in the Book search screen should take the user to a Book Profile screen.

This will display basic information about the book (similar to what is shown on the search results page, but full screen), with a list of major characters included in the book, which series the books appears in, and links to find the book on Amazon (US and UK for now)

Repro steps

• Head to /books and search with a blank string
• All book records from the database are eventually returned
• Because images are included in the search results, the response from the API server can take up to 19 seconds (on a relatively OK connection)

Suggestions for improvement

• Return paged data (e.g. first 10 records only)
• As user scrolls to the bottom of the page, send a get request for more records (e.g. infinite scroll)
• Load the text data separate from the images (fire a second get request for the images, using a loading spinner as each record's image until the response comes back)

When searching, enter key press does not perform the search only clicking on the Search button performs the search

This issue is related to #15 for dwCheckApi and will require that issue to be fixed before this one can be attempted.

Description of issue

When requesting book details from the database, the returned data for each book contains a base 64 string which represents the cover data.

For individual books, this request data isn't that big. Most of the individual book profile pages top out at about 60-100k (this includes the base 4 string for the cover). But when requesting a page full of book records (i.e. on the search page, when a search string is not supplied) this can end up in the megabytes.

In the above image, the first request was for a book profile page and the second line was for the book search page with no search string provided. As can be seen, the book search page was orders of magnitude larger than the individual book profile page.

Potential fixes

• Change the API calls for Books to return all data EXCEPT for the cover image
• Add an API method in the Books controller which takes a book id and returns the base 64 string which represents the cover data

As of issues 2 and 12 on dwCheckApi, the image data is now returned as a base64 string.

This means that the view is now broken as the image url is no longer valid. Fix this using src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADIA..." (for example)

Reported by James:

the can't find any results also shows when the search is happening

Was unable to recreate on live, using Chrome with throttling. Suggest using local with breakpoints.

Clicking on a series entry (on the Series search results table) will take the user to a full page view of the Series. This should include a list of books (similar partial to book search results) included in the series (in the order in which they take place).

This may need to be done before #6 can be undertaken.

It will also require researching what (if anything) will break when we upgrade

Summary of Issue

The current packages.json includes a reference to a vulnerable version of Bootstrap. The CVE can be found here.

The tl;dr is that bootstrap should be upgraded from 3.3.7 to, at least, 4.1.2