Serverless Functions

As opposed to managing a server backend, ZotMeal uses serverless functions that are ran on-demand in the cloud, with AWS Lambda as our cloud service.

Cron Jobs

Inside the ./apps/server folder you will see something like this:

The src/functions/trpc directory is used for creating API endpoints for our tRPC functions (for future work). tRPC helps us write APIs with autocomplete and type checking.

Inside the src/functions/cron folder we can find:

daily.ts

weekly.ts

Each of these .ts functions corresponds to a specific cron job that our app performs.

Daily: Fetches the menu from CampusDishAPI for the current day and inserts it into the database. Runs every day at midnight to ensure the most up to date menu information.
Weekly: Fetches all menus from CampusDishAPI for all days at most 2 week away from today. Allows users to see future menus for up to 2 week away.

Server Functions

The main functionality of these jobs can be found in the ./packages/api/src/server subdirectory.

server/daily

Functions in parse.ts:

getCampusDishMenu Fetches and parses the CampusDish menu for a given date.

Input: Date, RestaurantName, string (periodId)
Returns: CampusDishMenu

upsertMenusForDate Fetches and upserts the CampusDish menu for all periods of a given date.

Input: Date, RestaurantName
Returns: None

Functions in index.ts

daily Performs the daily cron job action: Fetches the menu for the current date and upserts it into the database.

Input: Date, RestaurantName
Returns: None

server/weekly

weekly Performs the weekly cron job action: Fetches the menu for all 14 days after the current date and upserts them into the database.

Input: Date, RestaurantName
Returns: None

Server/scrapeEvents

getHTML Fetches the raw HTML of the page from the URL provided

Input: string (URL)
Returns: string (HTML)

scrapeEvents Scrapes the events from the events page URL provided to create a list of all upcoming events.

Input: string (HTML)
Returns: Event[]