Sockets - Evelynn and Shirley

[shirley1chu]

slack.rb

Congratulations! You're submitting your assignment!

You and your partner should collaborate on the answers to these questions.

Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
How did you go about exploring the Slack API? Did you learn anything that would be useful for your next project involving an API?	We used binding.pry to look at the result of the API calls and to discover how the result data was stored in the JSON file. We were very surprised and frustrated by the lack of differentiation in the Slack API's response code (they're all 200 OK!) but it was helpful to use binding.pry to discover that "ok" could be true or false. This was a good lesson to take to our next API project - don't trust the response code!
Give a short summary of the request/response cycle. Where does your program fit into that scheme?	The request/response cycle is when a client sends a request and receives a response from a server. The response comes back from the server in a variety of formats depending on the request protocol. Our program fits into that scheme as the client making the request. The command line program is a client and Slack API's server is the server.
How does your program check for and handle errors when using the Slack API?	It checks the response code (ha! this is useless here) and the value of "ok" for the response. The program raises SlackApiErrors everywhere but the driver code. Certain methods return nil for bad input. In main.rb, we don't want to break the program when a user gives invalid input so instead we just keep the user in the loop until they give valid input or quit.
Did you need to make any changes to the design work we did in class? If so, what were they?	We made one small changes of passing an argument in Workspace#send_message. We thought this was the most logical way for the message to get passed to the selected recipient.
Did you use any of the inheritance idioms we've talked about in class? How?	Recipient served as an abstract class with template methods. We used polymorphism to send messages to both users and channels. Users and channels had methods with the same name so even though they had different types of attributes, they could respond to the same types of messages.
How does VCR aid in testing a program that uses an API?	It records an API call that the program makes once so that when a method is called in a test, it isn't repeatedly pinging an API server.

[droberts-sea]

slack.rb

What We're Looking For

Feature	Feedback
Core Requirements
Git hygiene (no slack tokens)	yes
Comprehension questions	yes
Functionality
List users/channels	yes
Select user/channel	yes
Show details	yes
Send message	yes
Program runs without crashing	yes
Implementation
API errors are handled appropriately	yes
Inheritance model matches in-class activity	yes
Inheritance idioms (abstract class, template methods, polymorphism) used appropriately	yes
Methods are used to break work down into simpler tasks	yes
Class and instance methods are used appropriately	yes
Overall	Excellent job overall. This code is well-written and well-tested. It is clear to me that the learning goals around understanding the request/response cycle, consuming and API, and implementing a design using inheritance from scratch were all met. I've left a few inline comments for you to review below, but in general I'm quite impressed by what I see here. Keep up the hard work!

[droberts-sea]

Why is private commented out?

[droberts-sea]

I think an attr_reader might be the right call for selected as well, since it's only changing from within this class.

[droberts-sea]

You have a lot of repeated code between this method and select_user above. Is there a way you could DRY this up?

[droberts-sea]

What happens to a previously selected user?

[droberts-sea]

You've done a great job throughout this project of identifying and testing failure cases.