Some decisions made:

• Brand and Model are unique by the name.
• Brand and Model, once created, cannot be modified via application
• Creation or modification of entities happens via CreationModificationRequest classes
• Returning the data to the client (REST-client) happens via Dto.
• Although both maven and gradle builds are provided and working, I have favoured maven.
• The environment details: Java(Temurin-11.0.13+8), maven(3.8.6), gradle(8.1.1), tested on (MacOs Ventura 13.3.1)

Points to improve on:

• Logging
• Error handling could be improved. Right now errors are being reported as a part of "message" property of the error thrown by spring-boot
• The example customer with the customer's DOB in the format dd.MM.yyyy could be provided right it failed until the user reads the feedback and passes the date in the right format.
• More controller tests cases could be written -especially regarding the data validations.
• Search API for customers could be provided and customers could be made unique (right now firstName, lastName, DOB is NOT the unique key)
• Searches for vehicles, customers and contracts should be paginated.
• Perhaps using hibernate would have made things easier. I chose JPA because I could not find Hibernate in the job description or in the skills required.

Things to cry about and the learnings

• I spent more time with configuration (finding the compatible spring-boot version for Java11, finding the right swagger and flyway versions for the spring-boot version) ensuring that the app starts only after the database is ready (it turns out that depends_on alone is not enough for MySQL but healthcheck too is needed)

Running the project

1. After cloning the code, run either of the commands sh run_gradle.sh or sh run_mvn.sh.
2. Use sh stop.sh to stop the application.

Important links:

• baeldung-spring3-opendoc
• Swagger-ui
• Open-API
• Prometheus
• hibernate-envers
• hibernate-envers