ascenda_search

API endpoint: https://ascenda-search.herokuapp.com/search

GET parameters: hotels[]: String OR destination: String

General Approach:

1. Data Procurement

   a) Fetch responses from all 3 supplier endpoints

   b) While looping through the hotels from each response, populate a global variable hotels_data which maps hotel_id to its relevant data that follows the following schema:

    {
    	"id": String,
    	"destination_id": int,
    	"name": String,
    	"location": {
    		"lat": double,
    		"lng": double,
    		"address": String,
    		"city": String,
    		"country": String,
    		"postal_code": String
    	},
    	"description": String,
    	"amenities": [String],
    	"images": { 	
    		'rooms': [{url: String, caption: String}],  	
    		'site': [{url: String, caption: String}] 
    	},  
    	"booking_conditions": [String]
    }
   

   In order to capture as much information as possible without overlapping, when parsing data for each unique hotel from different suppliers... i) for string based fields such as hotel name and description, the supplier with the longest entry is selected. ii) for array based fields such as amenities, the supplier with the longest array of amenities is selected.

   For amenities, it was considered whether or not it would be good to merge the arrays of different suppliers, but it was decided that unintended overlapping entries might occur due to different spellings or capitalisation of the same amenity.

   c) After which, populate another global variable hotels_by_destination which maps destination_id to its relevant hotel_ids.

2. Data Search

   It is assumed that only one filtering parameter is used per request. When no parameter is selected, all hotels are fetched.

   Data search is done via simple key value pair look ups using the global variables hotels_data and hotels_by_destination.