The Burroughs Test

A small command line utility to help a small fictional company calculate the dates on which they should pay their sales staff.

Company payroll is handled like so:

• Sales staff are paid a regular fixed base salary each month, plus a regular monthly bonus.
• Base salaries are paid on the last day of each month, unless that day is a Saturday or Sunday (a weekend), in which case they are paid on the Friday before the weekend
• On the 15th of each month, bonuses are paid for the previous month, unless that day is a weekend, in which case they are paid on the first Wednesday after the 15th.

The utility should calculate the payment dates for the next 12 months, including the current month, and output to the screen in a CSV format.

Table of contents

1. Quick Overview
2. Getting Started
   1. Assumptions
   2. Installing
   3. Running the app
3. Setup your application
   1. General settings
   2. Adding or editing payment rules
4. Tests
   1. Running the test suite
   2. Test Watcher
5. Running it as third party package
   1. Install the package
   2. Running it in the code
6. Lint
7. Possible upgrades
8. Known Issues
9. Acknowledgements

Quick Overview

Install

git clone https://github.com/NEOLPAR/burroughs_test.git burroughs-test-neolpar
cd burroughs-test-neolpar
npm install 
npm start

Run

npm start

Setup

npm run setup

Tests

npm test

npm run test-watch

Lint

npm run lint

As third party package

npm install --save 'burroughs-test-neolpar'

const paymentDates = require('burroughs-test-neolpar');

console.log(paymentDates);

Getting Started

You’ll need to have Node 12.18.3 or later version on your local development machine. We recommend using the latest LTS version. You can use nvm (macOS/Linux) or nvm-windows to switch Node versions between different projects.

Please follow the instructions to install and run this app and their choices.

Assumptions

1. This could be processed by some application which will process the payments, so I assumed that the full date was needed.

   My first approach was to set a month and a year columns, however it would need to be processed. So, I decided to not adding those columns and just add a full date in 'Europe/London' time zone format. Adding compatibility for other time zones is a possible upgrade for this application.

2. This could be processed by some application which will process the payments, so I didn't add any extra user information like greetings or application header. This is just returning the CSV text.

3. Since ES2015, JavaScript has TCO (Tail Recursion Optimization). Recursivity was improved, although it has an issue for large iterations where the recursive function hit the call stack size limit and throws an error. Ref: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/blogs/performance-of-recursion-vs-loop-using-javascript

   On this application, 24 is the max. permitted iteration. So, we'll never hit the limit. For this reason, I decided to change getPaymentDates function to recursive, gaining some performance with it. (Old getPaymentDates)

Installing

First, we need to clone the project from Github, we'll install it in a folder called burroughs-test-neolpar or a different name at your choice.

git clone https://github.com/NEOLPAR/burroughs_test.git burroughs-test-neolpar

After cloning the app, we move to the app directory and install the dependencies.

cd burroughs-test-neolpar
npm install

Running the app

Now we are ready to start using this app with the following command

npm start

Please continue reading if you would like to change the project defaults or payment rules, run test, or run lint.

Setup your application

If you would like to change the default settings, please execute the following command:

npm run setup

This command will run a wizard to configure all the general settings and will give us the choice to add new payment rules or amend the existing ones.

Through the wizard we'll configure the following settings:

General settings

• Months: (Number) Default: 12. Number between 1 and 24. This will change the months that we want to show when we run the app.
• Export to CSV: (Boolean) Default: false. This will export a CSV file when we run the app. It will create an export folder and will create the files there with the names as the following format YYYY-MM-ddTHH.mm.ss.csv.
• Add or edit payment rules: (Boolean) Default: false. We can change just the general settings without changing any payment rule, so the wizard won't go further on the setup and will save the settings.

Adding or editing payment rules

• Name: (String) Unique. String of a to z characters up to 10 of length. This option will just be shown if we are adding a new payment rule.
• Description (String) String of a to z characters up to 100 of length. This is a description of the payment rule.
• Allowed months: (Checkbox) At least one month selected. Months where the rule will be applied.
• Payment day: (String) Allowed 'last', 'first', Number between 1 and 31. The day of the month when this rule will be process.
• Allowed weekdays: (Checkbox) At least one selected. Weekdays allowed to process the payment.
• Previous or next week: (List) This is when you want to process the payment in case it falls in a not allowed weekday. This works with Weekday fallback.
• Weekday fallback: (List) This is the weekday when you want to process the payment in case it falls in a not allowed weekday. This works with Previous or next week.

Tests

Unit test are written in Jest. Please add a unit test for every new feature or bug fix.

Running the test suite

Perform a single pass of the test suite:

npm test

Test watcher

During development we can use jest test watcher. Run the watcher with the following command:

npm run test-watch

Lint

This application has been developer using ESLint. You can run the lint checks with the following command:

npm run lint

Running it as third party package

This app can be installed as a package of a bigger application. We need to follow the next steps:

Install the package

This package is on npmjs.com. So, we can install it as any node dependency.

npm install --save 'burroughs-test-neolpar'

Running it in the code

We need to import the package to our code, and that's all! We will get a string with the default CSV output and the default payment rules.

const paymentDates = require('burroughs-test-neolpar');

console.log(paymentDates);

Possible upgrades

• Choice to remove an existing payment rule.
• Export CSV files with a path and filename of your choice.
• Compatibility with other time zones than 'Europe/London'.
• Changing rule payments name.
• Looping after change one payment rule. In case you want to add or edit more than one rule.
• Tests for setup module.

Known Issues

• Setup doesn't save the settings when it's used as third party package. Paths must be checked and set as absolute. A config file like .burroughs-config at the project lvl would be a great idea.

Acknowledgements

I have used some third party projects and I am really grateful to the authors and communities behind them:

• @babel
• @jest
• @jest-community
• @eslint
• @eslint-config-airbnb-base
• @eslint-plugin-import
• @convert-array-to-csv
• @inquirer
• @codinggarden