My first project
I want to shout out to all my cohort mates 5/26FT. As most of us have agreed. This is hard.
Three weeks ago I started learning Ruby, and the OOP(object oriented programing) paradigm. In the past I dabled at learning “code”. Now I know I hadn’t even put my pinky toe into the water yet. Here I am feeling like I am neck deep, and I know that the depths are unfathomable.
Today I completed the, what seemed like an infinite, loop:
Until done do
1. I would raise my hands victorious, pumping my fists, and dance around the room after
conquering a single line of code.
2. This same line of code broke me down just a few minutes before, and the next line of code
might cast the seeds of doom and gloom back into my life.
end
Today I passed the condition being evaluated in my “until” loop. I finished a project of my own design. Infinite loop now complete! For the past 13 hours I have coded a CLI(Command Line Interface) gem that runs in your terminal, and it works! Check it out if you dare!. The requirements were:
- Get data from a website by either scraping it, or accessing an API(Application Programming Interface).
- Create objects from the data - OOP design here we come!
- Create a CLI that would allow a user to access the data
The birth of a meal planner
Once I knew what I had to do I started searching the web for what information I wanted build objects out of. I immediately decided against scraping. Let me tell you scraping is a monster of a project. Without getting to much into detail you better have some tools in your belt that help you with CSS selectors. On top of that everything might break when the website decides to change even a single detal. API’s are a blueprint for communicating with someone elses data. I found this wonderful database with a fleshed out API called Spoonacular. They have something like 36,000 recipes and you can send a request for that data, we call it sending a get request. The API even let’s you make custom requests to give you exactly what you want. Bing Bang Done custom meal planner based on user inputs was decided.
Why did I choose to let the user give custom options?!
So it turns out what I though was a done deal and easy project morphed into something a bit more complicated than I originally though. Not only did I have to request data I had to figure out how to enter in unique requests to Spoonacular per a users input.
def create_url
@base_url = "https://api.spoonacular.com/mealplanner/generate?apiKey=40a070e54bfd4638ad8cf6174a3bc3c5&timeFrame=day"
@allergies_url = "&exclude=#{User.all[0].allergies.join(",")}"
@diet_plan_url = "&diet=#{User.all[0].diet_plan}"
if User.all[0].allergies.empty? && User.all[0].diet_plan.empty?
@url = @base_url
elsif !User.all[0].allergies.empty? && User.all[0].diet_plan.empty?
@url = @base_url << @allergies_url
elsif User.all[0].allergies.empty? && !User.all[0].diet_plan.empty?
@url = @base_url << @diet_plan_url
else
@url = @base_url << @diet_plan_url << @allergies_url
end
end
Don’t get me started on the logic nightmare of the CLI and trying to write DRY(Do Not Repeat) code. I also had to design multiple objects that would allow me to follow OOP principles. I am pretty sure I still need to add at least another object creator, otherwhise known as a class, called Meal_planner. In OOP design you think about who is responsible for creating and storing data. It shouldn’t be the job of a meal to create a meal_plan.
OOP design paradigm
This is a doozy here. So let’s just talk about the actual objects themselves. Objects Creators(class) in OOP can be thought of as factories. Take my Meal object creator(class). If you were to walk up to a big wharehouse that says Meal on it you would be outside of my factory. There is a button on the outside of the factory that has the factory make a meal. The meal is called an “instance” of the Meal factory. Inside my Meal factory there is an assembly line that will automatically add information and methods(ways for the meal to do things) and spit out a meal. Outside the factory there is now a Meal class object and a meal instance object. You can now interact with the meal object - hopefully I don’t break any minds here - by having the meal add stuff to itself, tell you it’s attribute, and work with it’s methods. All of this was put into it based off the design blueprint/assembly line in the Meal factory.
