Event Management API

A RESTful API for managing events, user authentication, and RSVPs built with TypeScript, Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.

Table of Contents

• Setup and Running Instructions
• API Documentation
• Design Decisions and Tradeoffs
• Additional Features

Setup and Running Instructions

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v14 or higher)
• MongoDB (v4.4 or higher)
• npm or yarn

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/event-management-API.git
   cd event-management-API

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install

3. Create a .env file in the root directory and add your MongoDB connection string:

   MONGODB_URI=mongodb://localhost:27017/event-management
   JWT_SECRET=your_jwt_secret
   PORT=3000

4. Start the server:

   npm start

5. The API will be available at http://localhost:3000.
6. Database Seeding

To populate the database with initial data for testing and development:

# Seed the database using the default environment
npm run seed

The seed script creates:

5 users (including an admin user) 6 events of different categories 8 RSVPs with different statuses

Admin user credentials:

Email: admin@example.com Password: admin123

Regular user credentials:

Email: john@example.com, jane@example.com, etc. Password: password123

7. Run tests:

   npm test

API Documentation

Authentication Endpoints

Register a new user:

POST /api/auth/register

Request Body:

{
  "name": "John Doe",
  "email": "john@example.com",
  "password": "password123"
}

Response (201 Created):

{
  "message": "User registered successfully"
}

Login a user:

POST /api/auth/login

Request Body:

{
  "email": "john@example.com",
  "password": "password123"
}

Response (200 OK):

json
{
  "user": {
    "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
    "name": "John Doe",
    "email": "john@example.com"
  },
  "tokens": {
    "accessToken": "jwt-token-string",
    "refreshToken": "refresh-token-string"
  }
}

Get current user:

GET /api/auth/me

Headers:

Authorization: Bearer jwt-token-string

Response (200 OK):

{
  "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
  "name": "John Doe",
  "email": "john@example.com"
}

Logout a user:

POST /api/auth/logout

Response (200 OK):

{
  "message": "User logged out successfully"
}

Event Endpoints

Get all events:

GET /api/event?page=1&limit=10&category=workshop&location=San+Francisco&date=2025-10-15

Response (200 OK):

{
  "events": [
    {
      "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c86",
      "title": "JavaScript Workshop",
      "description": "Learn about the latest JavaScript features",
      "date": "2025-04-05T14:00:00.000Z",
      "location": "New York City Tech Hub",
      "organizer": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
      "category": "workshop",
      "maxAttendees": 50,
      "attendees": ["60d21b4667d0d8992e610c87"]
    }
  ],
  "pagination": {
    "total": 6,
    "page": 1,
    "limit": 10,
    "pages": 1
  }
}

Get a specific event:

GET /api/event/:id

Response (200 OK):

{
  "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c86",
  "title": "JavaScript Workshop",
  "description": "Learn about the latest JavaScript features",
  "date": "2025-04-05T14:00:00.000Z",
  "location": "New York City Tech Hub",
  "organizer": {
    "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
    "name": "John Doe"
  },
  "category": "workshop",
  "maxAttendees": 50,
  "attendees": [
    {
      "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c87",
      "name": "Jane Smith"
    }
  ]
}

Create a new event:

POST /api/event

Headers:

Authorization: Bearer jwt-token-string

Request Body:

{
  "title": "Tech Conference 2025",
  "description": "Annual technology conference",
  "date": "2025-10-15T10:00:00Z",
  "location": "Convention Center",
  "maxAttendees": 500,
  "category": "conference"
}

Response (201 Created):

{
  "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c88",
  "title": "Tech Conference 2025",
  "description": "Annual technology conference",
  "date": "2025-10-15T10:00:00.000Z",
  "location": "Convention Center",
  "organizer": {
    "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
    "name": "John Doe"
  },
  "category": "conference",
  "maxAttendees": 500,
  "attendees": []
}

Update an event:

PUT /api/event/:id

Headers:

Authorization: Bearer jwt-token-string

Request Body:

{
  "title": "Updated Event Title",
  "description": "Updated event description"
}

Response (200 OK):

{
  "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c88",
  "title": "Updated Event Title",
  "description": "Updated event description",
  "date": "2025-10-15T10:00:00.000Z",
  "location": "Convention Center",
  "organizer": {
    "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
    "name": "John Doe"
  },
  "category": "conference",
  "maxAttendees": 500,
  "attendees": []
}

Delete an event:

DELETE /api/event/:id

Headers:

Authorization: Bearer jwt-token-string

Response (204 No Content):

{
  "message": "Event deleted successfully"
}

RSVP Endpoints

RSVP to an event:

POST /api/event/:id/rsvp

Headers:

Authorization: Bearer jwt-token-string

Request Body:

{
  "status": "attending" // or "maybe" or "declined"
}

Response (200 OK):

{
  "eventId": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c88",
  "userId": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
  "status": "attending",
  "created": "2023-04-19T10:30:00.000Z"
}

GET /api/event/:id/attendees

GET /api/event/:id/attendees

{
  "attendees": [
    {
      "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c85",
      "name": "John Doe",
      "rsvpStatus": "attending"
    },
    {
      "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c87",
      "name": "Jane Smith",
      "rsvpStatus": "maybe"
    }
  ]
}

GET events the current user is attending:

GET /api/users/me/events

Headers:

Authorization: Bearer jwt-token-string

Response (200 OK):

{
  "events": [
    {
      "id": "60d21b4667d0d8992e610c88",
      "title": "Tech Conference 2025",
      "date": "2025-10-15T10:00:00.000Z",
      "location": "Convention Center",
      "status": "attending"
    }
  ]
}

Design Decisions and Tradeoffs

• Framework: Chose Express.js for its simplicity and flexibility in building RESTful APIs.
• Database: MongoDB was selected for its scalability and ease of use with JSON-like documents.
• Authentication: Implemented JWT for stateless authentication, allowing easy scaling and session management.
• Error Handling: Centralized error handling middleware to manage errors consistently across the application.
• Validation: Used Joi for request validation to ensure data integrity and provide clear error messages.
• Testing: Chose Jest for unit and integration testing due to its simplicity and built-in mocking capabilities.
• Environment Variables: Used dotenv for managing environment variables, allowing easy configuration for different environments (development, testing, production).
• Logging: Integrated Winston for logging, providing a structured way to log application events and errors.
• Pagination: Implemented pagination for event listing to improve performance and user experience.
• Separation of Concerns: Organized the codebase into controllers, models, routes, and middleware to maintain a clean architecture and improve maintainability.

Future Improvements

• Error handling: currently some routes lack comprehensive error handling, implement centralized error handling middleware to manage errors consistently across the application
• Input validation: currently input sanitization is limited, improve input validation using existing Zod dependency
  • TODO: add validation for query parameters and path parameters
• Authentication & Authorization: currently only basic authentication is implemented and automatic setting of HTTP headers using Helmet, add CORS, use HTTPS, implement rate-limiting and input sanitization for bolstering security
  • TODO: add JWT Security Headers
• Logging: prominently feature logging using Winston for better monitoring and debugging
  • TODO: add separate loggers for different concerns (e.g. services, controllers, etc.)
• API Documentation: currently limited, use Swagger or Postman for comprehensive API documentation, facilitating easier onboarding and collaboration
• Environment management: currently handled locally, use dotenv for managing environment variables, ensuring sensitive information is not hard-coded
• Db schema: currently no explicit schema is illustrated, use dbdiagram.io or MongoDB Compass for visualizing the database schema
• Scalability concerns: improve API to handle increased loads and concurrent users w/ efficient database queries and caching strategies as well as modular code structure
• Plan breakdown into microservices: currently all deployed as a monolith, consider breaking down into microservices for scalability and maintainability
• Extend integration tests: currently limited to schema validation, extend integration tests to cover all endpoints and edge cases
• Plan cloud deployment (CI/CD): currently hosted locally, consider deploying to a cloud provider (e.g., AWS, Azure) for better scalability and availability and defining a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions or CirleCI
• Measure & Improve performance: currently no performance metrics, consider using New Relic or Datadog for monitoring and improving performance