Assignment #3: Tech Jobs (MVC Edition)

Introduction

Your first two tasks as an apprentice went well! You, Blake, and Sally built the TechJobs console prototype and then refactored the code to move it to an object-oriented format.

After demonstrating the prototype for the Company Team at LaunchCode, it received the green light to be fully built out as a web application.

The first step in this process will be to quickly develop a minimum viable product, or MVP. The goal is to get a functioning web app up and running with as little work as possible. That way, additional feedback and testing can be done early in the development process. After that, additional behind-the-scenes work will be carried out to fully develop the model and data side of the application.

For this next step in the project, you’ll be working with Carly.

Carly was once a LaunchCode apprentice as well, so she knows just what it’s like to be in your shoes. She’s done some initial work on the project and left you some TODO tasks that she knows you can handle.

Learning Objectives

In this project, you’ll show that you can:

1. Read and understand code written by others.
2. Work within the controller and view portions of a ASP.NET MVC application.
3. Use Razor syntax to display data within a view.
4. Create new action methods to process form submission.

TechJobs (MVC Edition)

You’ll start with some code that Carly has provided. The idea behind your current assignment is to quickly deliver a functioning ASP.NET MVC application, so you’ll focus on the controllers and views.

In order to do this, you’ll be reusing the JobData class and job_data.csv file from the console app. You will eventually have to go back and rewrite the data portion of the application to make a true, database-backed model. However, using the existing JobData class to provide some basic data functionality lets you focus on the views and controllers for now.

Your Assignment

The list below provides a general overview of your assigned tasks. Specific details for each part appear in the following sections, so be sure to read them carefully as you solve each problem.

1. Review Carly’s code in the JobData file as well as in the existing controllers and views.
2. Carly needs your help completing the code to display only certain jobs. She has the code to display all of the values that users can select to filter the jobs.
3. Carly started working on the search feature, but only got as far as writing the code to display the search form. She’s handed the project to you to finish the rest. First, you’ll create a controller method to retrieve search results.
4. Finally, you’ll display search results in the view.

Getting Started

Set up a local copy of the project:

1. In Canvas, Graded Assignment #3: TechJobs (MVC Edition) contains a GitHub Classroom assignment invitation link and then set up the project in Visual Studio. Refer back to the GitHub Classroom instructions from Assignment #0: Hello, World! for details.
2. Launch the application to make sure it starts up properly. Then shut it down.
3. Run the autograding tests. The tests for this assignment are set up the same way as for assignment 2. There are four tasks for this assignment, but the first doesn’t require any coding on your part. Therefore, there are 3 tests files (for tasks 2-4). As with assignment 2, we recommend that you only run the tests for the task you are currently working on.

1) Review the Code

Tip

One essential programming skill that you will develop is the ability to read and understand someone else’s code. This assignment begins with you practicing exactly that. Make sure you carefully examine the provided code BEFORE you start changing things.

Trying to “fix” a code sample before understanding how it works leads to confusion, frustration, and a broken program. DO NOT SKIP the code review!

Carly created a ASP.NET MVC application and filled in some features. She refactored JobData to generate a List of Job objects based on your TechJobs-OO work, and she added controllers and views for a “Home”, “List”, and “Search” page. JobData now also builds Lists for the Employer, Location, PositionType, and CoreCompetency objects.

The Data and Model

The “model” is contained in the JobData class, which is in the Data folder. We put “model” in quotes, since this class isn’t a model in the typical, MVC/object-oriented sense (maybe a better name for this assignment would be TechJobs VC).

The JobData class serves the same purpose as before—it reads data from the job_data.csv file and stores it in a format we can use. In this case, that format is a List of Job objects, which is stored in the Models folder. Note that Carly changed the path to the job_data.csv file to store it in the Data folder too.

You’ll use some of the static methods provided by JobData in your controller code. Since you’re already familiar with these, we’ll leave it to you to review their functionality as you go.

The Controllers

Expand the Controllers folder, and you’ll see that you have three controllers already in place. Let’s look at these one at a time.

The HomeController

This class has only one action method, Index(), which displays the home page for the app. The controller renders the Index.cshtml template (in Views/Home) and provides a fairly simple view.

The ListController

This controller provides functionality for users to see either a table showing all the options for the different Job fields (Employer, Location, CoreCompetency, and PositionType) or a list of details for a selected set of jobs.

If you look at the corresponding page at /list, you’ll see an “All” column in the table. However, this option doesn’t work yet, and you will fully implement the constructor as you work on this project.

At the top of ListController is a constructor that populates ColumnChoices and TableChoices with values. These Dictionaries play the same role as in the console app, which is to provide a centralized collection of the different List and Search options presented throughout the user interface.

ListController also has Index() and Jobs() action methods. The first method renders a view that displays a table of clickable links for the different job categories. The second method needs to render a different view that displays information for the jobs that relate to a selected category. Both of the action methods can obtain data by implementing the JobData class methods.

Jobs() will work similarly to the search functionality, in that we are “searching” for a particular value within a particular field and then displaying jobs that match. However, this is slightly different from the other way of searching in that the user will arrive at this handler method as a result of clicking on a link within the Index.cshtml view, rather than via submitting a form.

The SearchController

Currently, the search controller contains only a single method, Index. It simply renders the form defined in the Index.cshtml template.

Later in this assignment, you will receive instructions for adding a second handler to deal with user input and display the search results.

The Views

Let’s turn our attention to the views.

Bootstrap Classes

The application uses a few Bootstrap classes to style the view content and job tables. You won’t have to explicitly add any Bootstrap classes to your views in this assignment, but it’s a great way to make your sites look good with minimal work.

The List Views

Turn your attention to List/Index.cshtml. This page displays a table of links broken down into several categories. Data from ColumnChoices is used to fill in the header row, and information stored in TableChoices generates the link text.

The most interesting part of this template is how we generate the links:

@foreach (var category in ViewBag.tableChoices)
{
   <td>
      <ul>
      @foreach (var item in category.Value)
      {
         <li>
               <a asp-controller="List" asp-action="Jobs" asp-route-column="@category.Key" asp-route-value="@item">@item</a>
         </li>
      }
       </ul>
   </td>
}

1. TableChoices is a Dictionary from ListController, and it contains the names of the Job fields as keys (Employer, etc.). The value for each key is a List of Employer, Location, CoreCompetency, or PositionType objects.
2. In line 17, category represents one key/value pair from TableChoices, and in line 21, item represents one entry from the stored List.
3. We’ve seen some of the syntax to generate a link within a Razor template, but we don’t have as much experience with asp-route-column and asp-route-value.This syntax causes Razor to dynamically generate query parameters for our URL.

In line 24, we set these parameters by using asp-route-column= and asp-route-value=. The values of these parameters are determined dynamically based on @category.key and @item. Since these values come from TableChoices, the keys will be employer, location, etc. The values will be the individual elements from the related List. When the user clicks on these links, they will be routed to the Jobs() action method in ListController, which looks for these parameters.

By the end of your work on this project, clicking on one of the links display a list of jobs that relate to the choice, via the Jobs() action method.

For now, click one of the Location links. This sends a request as we outlined above, but doing so only leads to an error.

Once you have completed the project, the page you will see at /list/values?column=location&value=... is generated by the Jobs.cshtml template. It has a similar structure as Index.cshtml, but the table consists of only one column.

Note

Select “Kansas City” from the list of locations, and then check the address bar of your browser:

/list/jobs?column=location&value=Kansas%20City

Razor inserts %20 for us, to represent a space, but this may actually be hidden in your browser’s address bar.

The Search View

Finally, click on Search from the home page, or the navigation bar, and open up Search/Index.cshtml in Visual Studio. You’ll see a search form (in both the browser and template file) that gives the user the option of searching by a given Job field, or across all fields. This is an exact visual analog of our console application.

This template will be used to display search results, in addition to rendering the form. This will give the nice user experience of easily searching multiple times in a row.

Wrap Up the Code Review

Once you understand the controllers and views that are already in place, you’re ready to begin your work.

In Visual Studio, select View > Tasks to pop open a small pane at the bottom of the window. This list is populated by any code comments that start with TODO. You’ll see your tasks listed, and clicking on any one will open the relevant file.

Note

You may not see a TODO #4. This is because TODO comments in views do not always show up in the Task List. If it is not there, check out the Search/Index.cshtml view to locate it!

2) Complete ListController

Complete the Jobs() action method in ListController. Right now, it returns a view, but we need to send some details about jobs to that view.

1. The view relies on ViewBag.jobs, so to start create a list in the action method called jobs.
2. If the user selects “View All”, you should use JobData.FindAll() to populate jobs with all the jobs and update ViewBag.title. If the user selects something specific, you should use JobData.FindJobsByColumnAndValue() to populate jobs with jobs that only match that criteria and update ViewBag.title to include the criteria the user chose.
3. Make sure to set ViewBag.jobs equal to jobs and run the program to see how it is working now!

If everything looks good to you, run the tests in TestTaskTwo in AutogradingTests to make sure you are on the right track before proceeding to task three.

3) Complete SearchController

Add a Results() action method to SearchController:

1. The Results() method should take in two parameters. Both parameters must be strings and the first one should be called “searchType” and the second one should be called “searchTerm”.
2. First, you need to create a local variable called “jobs” that is of type List<Job>.
3. If the user enters “all” in the search box, or if they leave the box empty, call the FindAll() method from JobData. Otherwise, send the search information to FindByColumnAndValue. In either case, store the results in a jobs List.
4. Pass jobs into the Index.cshtml view.
5. Pass ListController.ColumnChoices into the view, as the existing Index() action method does.

Run the tests in TestTaskThree to see how you did!

4) Display Search Results

Note

Before starting this task, un-comment out the tests in TestTaskFour. You can do so by removing the /* on line 18 and the */ on line 44.

Once you have your Results() action method passing information to the view, you need to display the data.

1. In Index.cshtml, create a loop to display each job passed in from the controller.
2. Put the job results into a set of tables, similar to what you did for the List/Jobs.cshtml view.

Run the tests in TestTaskFour to make sure that you have passed everything properly to the view!

Sanity Check

At this point, all autograding tests should be passing. To be sure, run all the tests at once and if any are failing, evaluate the error message and go back and fix your code.

How to Submit

To turn in your assignment and get credit, follow the submission instructions.

Bonus Missions

Here are some additional challenges, for those willing to take them on:

1. When we select a given field to search within and then submit, our choice is forgotten and returns to “All” by default. Modify the view template to keep the previous search field selected when displaying the results.
2. In the tables displaying the full job data, find a way to manipulate the font, style, capitalization, etc. to further distinguish the labels from the data (e.g. Employer: LaunchCode). (Hint: We capitalize the title string in multiple templates, so have a look around).
3. In the tables of the job results, make each value (except name) hyperlinked to a new listing of all jobs with that same value. For example, if we have a list of jobs with the JavaScript skill, clicking on a location value like Saint Louis will generate a new list with all the jobs available in that city.