41Movie Catalogue Search API

Background

The Video team at a large online retailer runs the catalogue behind its movie store. This service answers the store's search box and the movie pages: it finds published movies by title, director or cast and returns them a page at a time, most popular first. Since the last release, customers and the QA team have been reporting odd search results.

How the system works

Movies

A movie has an id, a title, a release year, a director, stars (the credited cast, in billing order), a popularity score from 0 to 100 and a status: DRAFT, PUBLISHED or RETIRED. Only PUBLISHED movies are ever shown to customers, in search results or on movie pages. Movies imported without a credited cast (most documentaries) have no stars at all; the API shows them with "stars": [].

Queries

The query q is normalised before searching: leading and trailing whitespace is removed, every run of whitespace inside it becomes a single space, and it is lower-cased. " The LONG night " becomes "the long night". After normalising, the query must be 2 to 60 characters long, both included (400 INVALID_QUERY otherwise, including when q is missing).

Matching

Catalogue text is normalised the same way, and a text matches when it contains the query anywhere, even inside a word: "ight" matches "The Long Night". The field parameter decides what is searched:

field is accepted in any case (STARS is stars). When it is left out, it is all. Any other value is 400 INVALID_FIELD.

Order and pages

Matching movies are ordered by popularity, highest first; then by year, newest first; then by title, alphabetically and ignoring case; then by id.

page (1 or more, default 1) and size (1 to 50, both included, default 10) pick one page of that list: page 1 is the first size movies, page 2 the next size, and so on. Both must be whole numbers (400 INVALID_PAGE otherwise). A page past the end is empty. total is the number of matching movies on all pages together.

API

In the search response, query is the normalised query, field is title, stars or all in lower case, and results holds this page's movies in result order. A movie in a response is {id, title, year, director, stars, popularity}. Errors return {"error": "<CODE>", "message": "..."}.

Project structure

src/main/java/com/bugnik/movies/
  MoviesApplication.java          Spring Boot entry point
  model/                          Movie, MovieStatus, SearchField
  repository/MovieRepository.java the catalogue (in memory)
  service/MovieSearchService.java query and paging checks, search, lookups
  service/SearchResult.java       one page of a search
  service/CatalogueException.java errors with a status and a code
  util/SearchText.java            text normalisation and matching
  util/MovieMatcher.java          which movies match a query in a field
  util/MovieOrder.java            the result order
  web/                            MovieController, MovieSummary, SearchResponse, ApiError, ApiExceptionHandler
src/test/java/com/bugnik/movies/   unit and MockMvc tests

Your task

Customers and the QA team report that:

• Customers say the search box misses films they know are in the store, although the movie pages open fine.
• The store's "Next page" button disappears after the first page, even when there are more results.
• A few ordinary searches fail with a server error.

Find and fix the defects so that all tests pass.

• Do not modify src/test/ or pom.xml.
• Keep your changes minimal. Fix the defects; don't rewrite modules.
• Additional hidden tests check the behaviour described in this README.