Polly

Polly is a liveview based polling application. It allows the users to

• Create polls with multiple options
• Voting of Polls
• Checking for results of the polls
• Updates the results and vote count in real time

Demo

A small demo of showing the vote counts increasing in real-time

screenrecording.mov

Things to know

• Once you sign in, just click at the username in the upper right corner to log out.

Architecture

This application from state management standpoint has 2 main components

• Polly.PollsManager - This is a module which uses 3 ets tables to manage the state of all the polls and their votes. More in-depth explaination is provided below

• Polly.VoteManager - Holds the votes casted by a single user. This genserver is instantiated when a user signs in and is uniquely identified using the user's username. Currently this module is used to check if the user has voted for a poll or not but can be extended for audit purposes, listing all votes on a user's profile page and more. More in-depth explaination is provided below

Polly.PollsManager

PollsManager takes care of all the state related to Polls. Essentially PollsManager stores data using 3 read and write concurrency enabled ets table. They are as

• :polls - Stores all the Poll structs with their options, :id of the poll is used as a key for fast lookup

• :polls_votes - Stores the total votes submitted towards a Poll. This table contains the vote counts in the format of {:id, count}. update_counter method provided by :ets is used to atomically increment these votes

• :polls_options_votes - Stores the votes per Option of a Poll. Each Poll can have many options and for each option vote count is stored in form of {:option_id, count}. Here as :id of an option is a unique uuid and hence an option can be uniquely identified without knowing the :id of the poll.

Polly.VoteManager

VoteManager is a gen-server responsible for holding and managing votes for a user. A VoteManager process holds votes casted by a single user. Each instance is registered to the VoteRegistry for fast and convinient discovery and is created under a DynamicSupervisor.

This process design works well here because the act of "storing a vote" and checking if a user has "already cast a vote" are independent operation on a user level.

The state of the gen server is of the format map(poll_id => %Vote{}). This has been done to provide O(1) lookups.

The VoteRegistry used here is also using partitioned storage to allow for more performance.

Decisions

• I could have definitely considered the PartitionSupervisor -> DynamicSupervisor -> GenServer for the Polls storage as well but I felt that when multiple users would try to vote on the same poll at the same time I would have had to synchronise those calls using handle_call and that could potentially slow down the act of increasing vote counters

• Similarly a simpler VoteManager backed by an ets table similar to PollyManager could have definitely worked but I was stuck on one of the criterias of the test i.e. "Action of one user shouldn't block the other".

• Parts of this application may seem a bit over-engineered but I did so keeping in mind that there can be thousands of users using this application at a time.

TradeOff

• I didn't spend alot of time on the UI and hence its really simple, obviously I would have done a better job if this was production.
• I could add alot more tests but felt what I have added cover a good chung of functionality.
• Could have added few more validations.
• Could have added functionalities like edit poll, delete poll, delete option etc but I focused on the core for the test.
• Could have considered using Horde based Registry and Supervisor to make this application distributed but that seemed a bit too overkill for this test. But I have production experience with Horde and distributed elixir application just to be aware.

Tests and Credo

I have tried to add as many test as I can, definitely could have added more but felt the ones added were good. Also added credo with a .credo.exs (added a few more checks that I personally like).

• mix credo passes
• mix test --cover outputs more then 80% coverage

Output of mix test --cover

27 tests, 0 failures

Randomized with seed 992261

Generating cover results ...

Percentage | Module
-----------|--------------------------
     0.00% | Polly.Constants
     0.00% | Polly.Schema.Vote
     0.00% | PollyWeb.Layouts
     0.00% | PollyWeb.PageHTML
    50.00% | PollyWeb.ErrorHTML
    63.33% | PollyWeb.UserAuth
    70.73% | PollyWeb.PollLive.Show
    71.43% | PollyWeb.PollLive.FormComponent
    80.00% | Polly.Application
    80.00% | Polly.Schema.Option
    80.00% | Polly.VoteSupervisor
    80.00% | PollyWeb.Telemetry
    81.41% | PollyWeb.CoreComponents
    83.33% | Polly.Factory
    87.50% | Polly.Polls
    90.00% | PollyWeb.Router
    92.86% | Polly.VoteManager
   100.00% | Polly
   100.00% | Polly.Mailer
   100.00% | Polly.PollsManager
   100.00% | Polly.Schema.Poll
   100.00% | PollyWeb
   100.00% | PollyWeb.ConnCase
   100.00% | PollyWeb.Endpoint
   100.00% | PollyWeb.ErrorJSON
   100.00% | PollyWeb.Gettext
   100.00% | PollyWeb.LoginLive.Index
   100.00% | PollyWeb.PollLive.Index
   100.00% | PollyWeb.PollyComponents
   100.00% | PollyWeb.UserSessionController
-----------|--------------------------
    81.52% | Total

How to start

To start your Phoenix server:

• Run mix setup to install and setup dependencies
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server or inside IEx with iex -S mix phx.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.