Security Questions Applicaiton

An over-engineered console app that stores security questions for a specified person. It utilizes several design patterns and libraries to separate concerns, and allow for a more usable and testable application that can be built upon and expanded.

This software utilizes patterns that would be more suitable for enterprise software, but they are being illustrated here as an example. Normally, a problem of this size would not warrant such a complex communication layer with

Design Patterns

• Dependency Injection
  • The application utilizes a simple DI stack to inject libraries and other common services that are used througout the application.
• Mediator Pattern (CQRS)
  • The application uses the mediator pattern (via the MediatR library) to separate concerns of business logic (back-end work) and presentation.
  • This pattern allows for each "feature" to be independently tested and verified.

Libraries

• MediatR
  • As discussed above, this library enables the use of the mediator pattern (CQRS) to separate concerns.
• Spectre.Console
  • This helper library allows for a great user experience while interacting with a console application, allowing for more interactivity for user choices, which expands on the original reqirements.
• EntityFrameworkCore
  • Using EF Core 7 for data persistance.
  • Utilizing code-first migrations to deploy schema changes to the database.

Improvements

There are several places this code could be improved in the future.

• Adding additonal input sanitation for lengths of inputs (based on configured data lengths) should be added to ensure data is not truncated when storing answers.
• A repository pattern could also be established and injected so the logic of the data is further abstracted from the features layer, if data layer communication becomes more complex.
• This current code uses the SQLite provider for ease of build and portability. If this were to be a full-fledged application, a more persitant data store (such as SQL server) would allow for things such as encryption and/or data masking to ensure security concerns are addressed for the confidentail information shared in the application.
• An end state should be entered into the flows as well, to allow for a clean exit of the application in the future.
• Instead of re-doing the answers as required, it may be a better flow in the future to allow the user to add/change their selections, and update selections they have already answered vs. completely re-doing the store flow.