Tobor

Tobor is Robot spelt backwards.

Tobor is also a CLI application to help you move an imaginary robot (or other item) around an imaginary table.

Additionally, Tobor is my submission for a coding test. The instructions can be found in INSTRUCTIONS.md

Configuring the application

You may configure the following settings in the application with environment variables.

Env Var	Default Value	Description
TABLE_LENGTH	5	Sets the table length. Ignored if TABLE_WIDTH is not set.
TABLE_WIDTH	5	Sets the table width. Ignored if TABLE_LENGTH is not set.
CAPITALISE_COMMANDS_AND_ARGS	false	When true, input commands and arguments will be capitalised to allow for case insensitive parsing - all commands and args are uppercase.
EXIT_ON_COMMAND_PARSER_ERROR	false	When true, the program will exit when a command is invalid and cannot be parsed.
FILENAME	not set	Allows commands to be read from a file rather than interactive CLI input.

Filename Input

A convenient input file to exercise many features of the application is docker-mount/fixtures/explore_table_boundaries.txt and is documented in docker-mount/fixtures/.

Other sample files to exercise the application can be sourced from src/__TESTS__/TestFiles/Scenarios and are documented in src/__TESTS__/TestFiles/Scenarios/README.md.

How to exercise the application

See below for instructions for each of these ways to exercise the application.

• Build and run the application in a Docker container
• Run tests locally
• Run the application locally

System requirements

Node 18

Build and run the application in a docker container

Build

docker build --tag tobor .

Run

docker run -it tobor

Run and supply environment variables

docker run \
-e FILENAME=/app/docker-mount/fixtures/explore_table_boundaries.txt \
-e TABLE_WIDTH=6 \
-e TABLE_LENGTH=6 \
-e CAPITALISE_COMMANDS_AND_ARGS=true \
-e EXIT_ON_COMMAND_PARSER_ERROR=true \
--mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/docker-mount,target=/app/docker-mount \
tobor

Run tests locally

npm install

npm run test

Run the application locally

npm install

Provide configuration (optional)

cp .env.example .env

Serve with nodemon

npm run serve

Build and Run

npm run build && npm run start

Design discussion

I chose to impose a constraint that all commands and arguments should be modelled in uppercase. This allows me to easily allow for case insensitivity by offering the capitaliseCommandsAndArgs configuration.

Where integer input is required, I am allowing any input that I can parse as an integer in base 10 that doesn't violate the entity's requirements. Eg decimal input is allowed, coordinates can't be below 0, table dimensions can't be less than 1.

Next steps

Increase test coverage for CLI Input Reader.

Consider splitting up the output of the tobor service (eg REPORT command) and output that is necessary for user interaction like CLI interaction, error reporting.