BetterReads

Reading is good for you, but we can make it better.

Team members: Oreoluwa Akinwunmi, Renbo Xu, Helena Sokolovska, and Marvel Hariadi

Our application is an intelligent, social book discovery platform tailored to passionate readers who want a more engaging and personalized experience than traditional apps like Goodreads. It allows users to explore and write reviews for books; receive personalized reading recommendations; and curate reading wishlists. By storing book metadata, user preferences, and behavioral insights, the platform delivers a highly individualized user experience. Built on MongoDB, it features account management, a natural language processing (NLP)–powered search engine, a reading recommendation system, and interactive user features.

Instruction for Running the App with Docker

Clone the repository and run with Docker Compose. In your bash terminal, run:

# After downloading our app, ensure you are under TEAM25_BETTERREADS to run the following command
docker-compose up -d --build  # start container
docker-compose down        # tear down container

Accessing the Application

• Frontend: http://localhost:5173
• Backend API: http://localhost:3000
• Recommender API: http://localhost:5001

Environment Variables

The Docker Compose files include default environment variables. For custom configurations, create a .env file in the project root directory.

Example .env file:

MONGO_URI=mongodb://root:rootpassword@mongodb:27017/betterreads?authSource=admin
REDIS_HOST=redis
REDIS_PORT=6379
REDIS_DB=0
JWT_SECRET=your_custom_jwt_secret

Milestones

Milestone 1:

The following frontend features have been implemented:

• Book product card component
• Book gallery component (carousel of many book cards)
• Book review card component
• User profile component
• Header component with navigation links
• Login and signup page
• Book search page
• Book details page
• User profile page

Milestone 2:

The following features have been implemented for Milestone 2:

Database

1. Designed the relational schema for Books, Reviews, and Users, and created corresponding backend models.
2. Established a MongoDB connection and initialized the project database (booksdb) with the necessary collections: books, reviews, and users.
3. Populated the database with sample data: 3625 books, 7 reviews, and 7 users.

Backend

1. Configured routing and implemented the majority of the required API endpoints.
2. Developed key application functionalities:
   • Sign-In & Registration Page: Implemented sign-in and sign-up functionality, including support for guest access.
   • User Profile Page: Implement functions for user profile page that displays user information fetched from the database.
   • Book Details Page: Implement functions for a book details page that presents book data retrieved from the database.
   • Review Submission: Implement function so user can write and submit reviews for books, which will be presisted to the database.
   • Book Search Page: Implemented a keyword-based search feature that matches against book titles and descriptions.

Milestone 3:

The following featuers have been implemented for Milestone 3:

• UI has been made responsive to fix some bugs.
  • Functional 'make reviews' button to autoscroll to right component.
  • Select rating when creating or editing a new review.
  • Filtering the user review from other reviews on detail page of book
  • Cleaner UI for the search page
• NLP Book search bar now has additional genre selection option.
  • Search bar allows you to search (if wanted) to allow for stricter limitation
• Fixed background images.
• Hashed and salted user passwords in the backend with bcrypt for security.
• Ability to persist wishlist from guest session when user signs up for a new account
• Added pagination for book search results.
• Implemented recommender system (external API): genre-based, collaborative filtering, and popularity-based recommendations.
• Implemented Redis caching for user-item matrix and popular books.

Test Suite Section

1. Test folder were created including setup.js, books.test.js, reviews.tests.js and users.test.js.
2. Test using Mocha, Chai, Supertest, Mongodb-Memory-Server. Test report is generated using mochawesome.
3. There are 39 total tests covering API calls of books.js, reviews.js and users.js
4. Instruction to run the test:

# After downloading our app, cd better-reads/backend to run the following command
npm install # install all required dependencies for testing
npm test    # run test 

# The test result report can be reviewed by opending mochawesome.html by browser. The mochawesome.html is located at better-reads/backend/mochawesome-report/mochawesome.html

Accessing test suite html file instrutions:

• The test result report can be reviewed by opending mochawesome.html by browser. The mochawesome.html is located at better-reads/backend/mochawesome-report/mochawesome.html