Your team has been developing an app that allows users to search the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC)'s APIs for public domain artwork. You've inherited some code from a teammate – a React application with some components and some functions for interating with a search API. Your job is to finish the rest of the tasks your team has agreed on! We've listed those acceptance criteria in this document, as well as some tips for working with Art Institute of Chicago's APIs.
❗ Please limit your time spent on this project to one hour. If you do not finish all the acceptance criteria listed here, that's okay! Our goal is to give you something to discuss with your interviewer at the next stage, whether the project is feature-complete or not. You can chat with your interviewer about what you would do with more time.
To get started, you'll need to initialize a new Git repository using this repository as a template. You can do that one of two ways:
After that, proceed to the acceptance criteria section.
- Click the "Use this template" button on the GitHub page for this repo. It's located above this readme, and above the preview of the project's file structure.
- On the next page, give your new repo a name. Make sure the repository is public!
- Click "Create repository from template". Your repository will generate and you will be navigated to its GitHub page.
- Click the "Code" button to reveal the command you can run to clone your repo to your computer, then click the "copy" button (it looks like a clipboard).
- Run that code in your terminal
cd
into your new directory- Run
npm ci
to install the project's dependencies
Now, to develop the app locally, run npm start
. A new window will open in your browser. Happy coding!
In your terminal, cd
into the folder you want your project to live in and run the following commands:
# Generate a new repo from this template with the name `take-home-assignment`
# and clone it to your computer in a new folder named `take-home-assignment`
gh repo create take-home-assignment --template the-collab-lab/career-lab-assignment-next --public --clone
# Move into this new folder and install the project's dependencies
cd take-home-assignment && npm ci
Now, to develop the app locally, run npm start
. A new window will open in your browser. Happy coding!
Your team has agreed on the following requirements for the app's MVP (minimum viable product). Your teammate has implemented a couple of these criteria already. Start with ./src/components/App.jsx
to familiarize yourself with their work, then build on top of it. You're gonna do great!
- Create a
searchArtworks
function for making GET requests to/search/artworks/
. Seesrc/utils/api.js
- Request a local copy of data in
searchArtworks
to avoid making too many requests to the AIC/artworks/search/
endpoint while the app is in development - When the UI is complete, ensure that
searchArtworks
makes requests to the AIC/artworks/search/
endpoint, as described in "Working with the API"
- Request a local copy of data in
- Create a
SearchForm
component that will allow the user to perform a search. Seesrc/components/SearchForm.jsx
- Fix a known bug: the whole app refreshes when
SearchForm
is submitted
- Fix a known bug: the whole app refreshes when
- In the
App
component, render- the
SearchForm
component and - a list of results including the name of the piece and the artist who created the piece.
- the
- Render a new view when a user clicks a result. It could be called
ImageDetailsPage
. - In the
ImageDetailsPage
component, render- a back button that, when clicked, returns the user to the list view💡, and
- the artwork whose title the user just clicked on
💡 You might think to install React Router to handle the back button functionality. That's probably something you would do in a production application, but your team has agreed that React Router is out of scope for this MVP. Instead, you can use conditional rendering to show and hide content!
Here's some logic you could use to approach the conditional rendering criterion:
- If no artwork is selected, render the list with the search form
- If an artwork is selected, instead render the
ImageDetailsPage
component - If the back button on
ImageDetailsPage
is clicked, render the list with the search form
AIC maintains one API endpoint for requesting data from its catalog, and another API endpoint for requesting the images from the catalog. These APIs have some dense documentation; we’ve outlined the things you should know.
You’ll make requests to the /artworks/search/
endpoint provided by AIC. You can build a request with a URL like the following:
https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/search?q={USER_QUERY}&query[term][is_public_domain]=true&fields=artist_title,date_display,id,image_id,thumbnail.alt_text,thumbnail.width,thumbnail.height,title
These URLs are quite long, but you don't need to worry about exactly what each part means. You'll need to replace {USER_QUERY}
with the thing your user searched for in the catalog. If your user searches for “cats”, your request url becomes:
https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/search?q=cats&query[term][is_public_domain]=true&fields=artist_title,date_display,id,image_id,thumbnail.alt_text,thumbnail.width,thumbnail.height,title
.
Try it our for yourself: open the “cats” query in your browser.
Requests to the /artworks/seearch/
endpoint return a JSON object. This object has a lot of information. You should focus on the data
property, which is an array of objects. Each object is shaped as follows:
artist_title
: a string indicating the known artist of the piecedate_display
: a string indicating the known production date of the pieceid
: a number representing the item’s unique idimage_id
: a string referencing the id of the full image for this catalog itemthumbnail
: an object with the following properties:alt_text
,width
, andheight
title
: a string indicating the title of the piece
AIC provides an endpoint dedicated to serving images. These image URLs are structured as follows:
https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/{IMAGE_ID}/full/843,/0/default.jpg
You should replace {IMAGE_ID}
with an image ID from the data you retrieve from the /artworks/search/
endpoint. You can use the resulting URL in an img
element to show that artwork to your users. For instance, the following img
element would render Georges Seurat's La grande jette in the browser:
<img
src="https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/1adf2696-8489-499b-cad2-821d7fde4b33/full/843,/0/default.jpg"
/>
You can also open La grande jette in your browser, if you’d like!