Accountable Restaurants DE

Inspiration

In CISC108 we used a Python file with information from Delaware Open Data to learn how to use lists. We went through that website and found a new set of data that included health code violations from eating establishments throughout Delaware. We thought that restaurants that receive health code violations would try to sneak them by their patrons, and so using our application users can see this information.

What it does

You are prompted to give information like your name and how you would like to sort the data. Then depending on your answers you can see how many health code violations have been reported in that area. Your answers may include: the entire state, a specific county, city, or zipcode.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and Typescript, but the final product is mainly TypeScript. We used the Node 'fs' and 'prompt-sync' libraries. The 'fs' library allowed us to read and turn our .CSV file into a TypeScript-readable file. That way we could make a list from that data. And the 'prompt-sync' library allowed us to get user input. We then made a 'Restaurant' class to map on the list and from there made many helper functions that utilized the object parameters to return appropriate information to user.

Challenges we ran into

We initially wanted to build a fully-working website that would display this information to users, however ran into many issues. We couldn't quite figure out how to get our TypeScript code to be read as Javascript with our imports. We then tried to think of alternatives such as using a different library 'D3.js' to build our own graphs using programming. There was a point where we wanted to quit and just turn in a simple HTML website with an embedded graph, but that felt like a cop out.