Product Recommendation Builder

Overview

This Meteor based application presents potential customers with a list of questions to answer. Answers to these questions help steer product recommendations. Production recommendations are then presented for purchase. Administrators can manage how recommended products line up with customer answers.

Technology

Meteor based application using React for the view layer and Mongo for the database. This application leverages Meteor 1.3's out of the box npm and ES2015 module support.

Installation/Running

git clone https://github.com/hwillson/meteor-recommendation-builder.git
npm install
npm start

Testing

Run all tests with npm test.

Modules

Customer

Access

• Customer facing recommendation builder: http://localhost:3000/build

Admin

Access

• Admin: http://localhost:3000/admin

Product Synch

• Admins can only add products to the recommendation engine that are available within the system.
• Products are pulled in from an external web service on a regular basis, and stored within Mongo.
• Product synch scheduling is controlled by percolate:synced-cron.
• Product synch is currently set to run every 24 hours
• When logged in as an admin a manual product synch can be run by calling the following method via a browser console: require('./imports/api/products/methods.js').synchProducts.call()
• Source product web service URL is configured in the settings.json file, and must be reachable via get (currently no authentication supported). Web service response must look like:

{
  "success": true or false,
  "data": "[
    {
      \"productId\": 123,
      \"productName\": \"Some Product\",
      \"productUrl\": \"http://blah.com/some-product\",
      \"productImage\": \"http://blah.com/some-image\",
      \"variationId\": 456,
      \"variationName\": \"Some Variation\",
      \"status\": \"active\" or \"inactive\"     
    },
    ...
  ]"
}

Managing Questions/Answers

• For now customer questions / available answers are managed as one main editable JSON based content block through the admin.
• This was done to cut a few corners to get things launched quickly (a proper question/answer admin interface will be built at some point).
• Once logged into the admin click on the "Questions/Answers" tab. Questions/available answers can then be modified in the presented textarea, using the following format:

{ 
  "questionId": "colors",
  "label": "Colors",
  "content": "What are your favorite colors?",
  "order": 1,
  "availableAnswers": [
    { "label": "Red", "value": "red" }, 
    { "label": "Green", "value": "green" }
  ]
},
{ 
  "questionId": "foods",
  "label": "Foods",
  "content": "What are your favorite foods?",
  "order": 2, 
  "availableAnswers": [
    { "label": "Pizza", "value": "pizza" }, 
    { "label": "Dougnuts", "value": "doughnuts" }
  ]
},
...