COMP 2406 – Fall 2020 Movie Database Project
Movie Database
Project Background
The goal of this project will be to create a web application similar to the Internet Movie
Database. Your application will maintain a database of movie information, including
things like the movie title, release year, writers, actors, etc. Your site will support regular
users, who will be capable of browsing all of the information on the site and adding
movie reviews. You will also need to support contributing users, who will be able to add
new people/movies and edit existing records. The site will also offer movie
recommendations based on a user’s past reviews. Within this document, the term
‘people’ is used to refer to people that are part of a movie (actor, writer, director, etc.),
while the term ‘user’ refers to a user of your application.
The following sections will outline the minimum requirements of the movie database
project. You are encouraged to ask questions to clarify the requirements and constraints
of the project. The details for this project may be updated slightly throughout the term if
necessary. It is the students’ responsibility to ensure they are up to date on any
changes to the document. A file summarizing the changes to the document will be
maintained and shared with the students.
Provided Data and Assumptions
The provided project zip file contains two files that you can use for initial movie data.
The movie-data.json file contains a JSON array with information for 9125 movies
retrieved from The Open Movie Database, while the movie-data-short.json file contains
an array with the first 10 of those movies. This JSON data should contain all of the
required information to initialize your server with movie data, though you will likely need
to parse it in some way to convert the data into a more usable format.
For the purposes of this project, you can assume that actor/director/writer names are
unique. If movie X lists “Norman Cates” as an actor and movie Y lists “Norman Cates”
as a director, you can assume these refer to the same person.
Technology Constraints
The main server code for your project must use Node.js. All client resources required by
your project must be served by your server. Your project’s data must be stored using
MongoDB. Any additional software/modules/frameworks you use must be able to be
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installed using your NPM install script. The backend of your project must be able to run
successfully on the provided course OpenStack image and your client must work within
an up-to-date Chrome browser. An updated list of allowed modules/frameworks/etc. will
be included with the project documents. If you are unsure if something is allowed or
would like to see if something could be allowed, you should ask for clarification before
proceeding.
User Accounts
The application must provide a way for users to create new accounts by specifying a
username and password. Usernames must be unique. A user should be able to log in
and out of the system using their username and password. Within a single browser
instance, only a single user should be able to be logged in at one time (i.e., user A and
user B cannot log in to the system within the same browser window). All newly created
accounts should be considered regular users until the user manually upgrades
themselves to a contributing user.
When a user is logged in, they should be able to view and manage information about
their account. The application must provide a way for the user to:
1. Change between a ‘regular’ user account and a ‘contributing’ user account. If
a user changes account types, it should only affect their ability to carry out an
action in the future. That is, anything created by a user while they have a
contributing user account should remain unaffected if the user switches back
to a regular account.
2. View and manage the people they follow. The user should be able to navigate
to the personal page of any person they have followed. The user should be
able to stop following any person that they have followed.
3. View and manage the other users they follow. The user should be able to
navigate to the user page of any user they have followed. The user should be
able to stop following any user that they have followed.
4. View recommended movies. These recommendations should be made based
on what information your web application knows about the user, such as what
movies they have reviewed or what people/users they have followed.
5. Search for movies by title, name, and/or genre keyword, at minimum.
Additional types of search can also be included. The user must be able to
navigate to the movie page for any of the search results.
Viewing Movies
When viewing a specific movie, a user must be able to:
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1. See the basic movie information, including at minimum: the title, release year,
average rating, runtime, and plot.
2. See the genre keywords and allow the user to navigate to search results that
contain movies with that genre keyword.
3. See the director, writer, and actors the movie has, which should also allow the
user to navigate directly to each person’s page.
4. See a list of similar movies to this one and allow the user to navigate to the
page for any of those movies. How similarity is defined is up to you, though
you should be able to support your algorithm design with logical arguments.
5. See movie reviews that have been added for the movie.
6. Add a basic review by specifying a score out of 10.
7. Add a full review by specifying a score out of 10, a brief summary, and a full
review text. You can use automatically generated text from an available
package to fill these values quickly but must support manual entry as well.
Viewing People (directors, writers, actors)
When viewing the page for a particular person, the user must be able to:
1. See a history of all of this person’s work. Each movie entry should allow the
user to navigate to that movie’s page.
2. See a list of frequent collaborators of this person. That is, a list of people this
person has worked with the most, according to your database information.
3. Choose to follow this person. If a user follows a person, the user should
receive a notification any time a new movie is added to the database that
involves this person, or any time this person is added to an existing movie.
Viewing Other Users
When viewing the page for another user, the current user must be able to:
1. See a list of all of the reviews this user has made and be able to read each
full review.
2. See a list of all of the people this user has followed and be able to navigate to
each person’s page.
3. Choose to follow this user. If a user X follows a user Y, user X should receive
a notification any time user Y creates a new review.
Contributing Users
If a user’s account type is set to be a contributing user, the user should be able to do
everything a regular user can do and also:
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1. Add a new person to the database by specifying their name. If the name
already exists, the user should not be able to add the new person.
2. Add a new movie by specifying all of the minimum information required by
your system, including at least one writer, director, and actor. The user should
only be allowed to add people to a movie if that person exists in the database
already. You can include an ‘auto-fill’ feature to generate a random movie
quickly but must also provide a way for the user to manually create a movie
entry.
3. When viewing a movie, be able to edit the movie by adding actors, writers,
and/or directors.
REST API
In addition to the web-based client that most users will use, your movie database
application must also provide a public JSON REST API that supports the following
routes and parameters, at minimum:
1. GET /movies – Allows searching for movies in the database. Returns an
array of movies that match the query constraints. Must support at least the
following query parameters:
a. title – A string that should be considered a match for any movie that
has a title containing the given string title (character case should be
ignored). If no value is given for this parameter, all movies should
match the title constraint.
b. genre – A string that should be considered a match if the movie’s list of
genre keywords contains the given keyword. If no value is given for
this parameter, all movies should match the genre constraint.
c. year – A number that should be considered a match if the movie’s
release year matches. If no value is given for this parameter, all
movies should match the year constraint.
d. minrating – A number that should be considered a match if the movie’s
overall average review rating on your site is greater than or equal to
the given value. If a movie does not have any reviews, the number
value of its rating should be considered 0.
2. GET /movies/:movie – Allows retrieving information about a specific movie
with the unique ID movie, assuming it is a valid ID. The returned JSON should
contain the basic movie information (title, year, actors, etc.) and also
information about the reviews of the movie.
3. POST /movies – Allows a new movie to be added into the database. It will
accept a JSON representation of a movie and is responsible for checking the
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data is valid before adding it to the database. Your documentation should
specify the required data and expected format. If a person is specified as a
writer/director/actor within the movie but does not currently exist in the
database, a new person should be created and added to the database.
4. GET /people – Allows searching for people within the movie database. At
minimum, this must support an optional name query parameter. If the query
parameter is included, it should return any person in the database whose
name contains the given name parameter. The search should also be done in
a case-insensitive nature. If no parameter is given, all people should match
the query.
5. GET /people/:person – Retrieves the person with the given unique ID, if they
exist. This should include, at minimum, the name of the person and the
movies they have been a part of.
6. GET /users – Allows searching the users of the application. At minimum, this
must support an optional name query parameter. If the query parameter is
included, it should return any user in the database whose name contains the
given name parameter. The search should also be done in a case-insensitive
nature. If the parameter is not specified, any user should match the search
constraint.
7. GET /users/:user – Get information about the user with the given unique ID,
if they exist. This should contain their username, their account status (regular
user or contributing user) and the reviews the user has made.
Project Report
You will also be required to submit a project report that must explain the overall design
of the system, outline any assumptions that were made, provide supporting arguments
for the design decisions that were made, discuss technologies used within the
application, document your server’s API, describe any testing completed as part of the
project, highlight key features of the system, and provide documentation on how to
use/test the system. You must be able to justify your design and implementation
choices from a perspective that considers scalability, robustness, extensibility, and
maintainability, as well as the overall user experience. It is important to document the
design decisions you make, as well as your reasoning for making those decisions and
any alternative approaches you tried or considered as the term progresses. This will
make writing a quality report near the end of the term significantly easier. We will
discuss potential sections and other outline details for the project reports throughout the
term.
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Pair Project Extensions
Pair projects will be held to higher standards than individual projects in general. If you
are completing a pair project, it is recommended that you include at least 3 of the below
extensions into your project, or similar extensions you come up with on your own. For
those looking for an A grade on the project, pairs are encouraged to include more than
the minimum recommended extensions and individuals are encouraged to include some
extensions as well.
1. Use React, Angular, or another supported frontend framework.
2. Implement a GraphQL API in addition to the REST API.
3. Implement your own load balancing solution and simulate a distributed system by
instantiating multiple instances of your server. This load balancer should be able
to detect any of the servers going offline (e.g., simulating a machine crash). This
load balancer could also handle the addition of more servers at runtime.
4. Support a full-sized/desktop interface, as well as a smaller, mobile-friendly
interface.
5. Provide in-depth automated testing of your API and system, including
documenting specific test cases and their expected results.
6. Implement your own caching mechanism for your server/API. Test your caching
system under various circumstances and compare its performance to a version
that does not use caching.
7. Implement a web-scraper to retrieve additional movie data from IMDB and
incorporate it into your system. You could do this in an automated way (e.g., like
a web crawler) or by allowing a user to provide an IMDB URL to have a specific
movie parsed. If your parser is error-prone, you could also use this feature to
initially populate a form on the page and have the user double-check the
information manually before it is submitted to the database
