Jonathan Nicholl
Software Engineer Portfolio
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While employed at Cosairus, I developed a search application to search release of information requests. The search app uses a Vue.js frontend with an ASP.NET Core backend.
The search has 29 different search parameters. Unused options do not affect search performance. There are also options for page size and sorting order. A SQL view does most of the work involved in the search, while LINQ is used to compose a dynamic select statement to get a page of filtered results and total result count. Users can only search for requests they have permission to access.
The search displays up to 1,000 paginated results, and up to 100,000 results can be exported as CSV. The exported results are streamed to the user’s device while the database connection is still open, making it highly efficient.
Authentication is handled using ASP.NET Core Session cookies, after logging in either with a one-time password, or cross-login from another application. I developed a two-way cross-login system with an existing, entirely separate React application so that logging in to one application allows seamless access to the other. This was accomplished by passing short-lived JSON web tokens from one application to the other. This is a similar technique what is used when signing in to a website though a third party account, such as a Google or Facebook account.
This link was made both ways. Returning back to the user’s search brought back up the previous search results, scrolling down to the release that was selected. To avoid storing the entire search query in the JWT, the search parameters were hashed and stored in a Redis database using the hash as a key. Then, only the hash needed to be passed in the JWTs.
