Summary of Work Completed - Project Integration Checkpoint

Notes:

For all of our debugging/testing, we used Postman extensively while running the server locally, sparingly adding our changes to the production server once we knew everything worked.
Most commits are on this account since we completed a lot of collaboration in person during class, and committed our changes form one computer in order to avoid annoying git merge issues.
The Flask backend was pretty difficult to understand, but relatively easy when using an OOP mindset(importing classes, using constructors, etc.)

At this point, we had just done simple experimentation with the models, and had a rudimentary API for our Breaking Bad characters' songs.
We had the model and API files made(based on the boilerplate code) but didn't fully understand it and were still experimenting

In order to gain more insight into the Flask APIs, we decided to experiment with an already existing API: Jokes.
We made a create function that used a POST request with JSON data in the request body to add a joke to the API.
This helped us figure out how the API interacted with the model and how to format our requests when connecting to the API endpoints.

Here, we transitioned the Character Songs API to an SQLAlchemy DB model instead of a simple python dictionary.
This took quite a bit of thinking, but after we were done the code was relatively simple.
We used db.Model to create our Song data model, and just used methods within that class to initialize variables and the actual data.

We scoured the Internet for data, since there were no online datasets available towards our needs.
We plan to add songs for the other characters later, since we want to have a wide variety of data.

This was when we started to finalize our API, and tested out different functionality. Both me and Srijan were very comfortable with coding in Flask and writing the API code, so it was relatively easy to move on from this point onwards.

This commit introduced a new lyrics argument to be passed into our charactersong API

Added lyricgenius API along with API token created on the Genius.com API tab
Passed in the lyrics argument to each song initialization
IMPORTANT NOTE: make sure that you write .lyrics after each genius.search_song() function call because this accesses the actual lyrics element of the Genius Song class that is returned.

Extra "junk" text was included in what lyricgenius returns
To fix this we splice at "Lyrics" and then display the second element of the newly created array so that we display the lyrics and not the junk at index 0.