Randall — Office Desk Reservation System

Randall is a web application for managing office desk reservations. Employees can browse available workplaces, make reservations up to two weeks in advance, and manage their own bookings. Admins can manage users and view the full office schedule.

Features

For employees

• Register and sign in with email and password
• Browse all active desks and their locations
• See which desks are available on a given day
• Make a reservation (up to 14 days in advance)
• View and cancel their own upcoming reservations

For admins

• Approve new user registrations
• Elevate users to admin
• Remove users
• View the full office schedule — who is sitting where on any given day

Architecture

graph LR
    Browser["Browser\n(React + TypeScript)"]

    subgraph "API Server (.NET 10)"
        Api["Randall.Api\n(Controllers, JWT auth)"]
        App["Randall.Application\n(Handlers, DTOs)"]
        Domain["Randall.Domain\n(Entities, business rules)"]
        Infra["Randall.Infrastructure\n(EF Core, SQLite, JWT, Password hashing)"]
    end

    DB[("SQLite\nrandall.db")]

    Browser -- "HTTP/JSON\n/api/*" --> Api
    Api --> App
    App --> Domain
    App --> Infra
    Infra --> DB

Backend — Clean Architecture

The backend follows Clean Architecture, enforcing a strict dependency rule: outer layers depend on inner layers, never the reverse.

Layer	Project	Responsibility
API	Randall.Api	HTTP controllers, JWT middleware, request/response mapping
Application	Randall.Application	Use-case handlers, DTOs, interfaces
Domain	Randall.Domain	Entities, value objects, business rules, Result<T> pattern
Infrastructure	Randall.Infrastructure	EF Core + SQLite, repositories, password hashing (PBKDF2), JWT token generation

Frontend

Single-page application built with React 19, TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind CSS. During development the Vite dev server proxies all /api requests to the backend, so no CORS configuration is needed locally.

Authentication

JWT Bearer tokens, issued on login and valid for 7 days. Admin privileges are encoded as an isAdmin claim and enforced at the controller level. New registrations require admin approval before the account can be used.

Data model

User
  ├── id, email (unique), name, passwordHash
  ├── isApproved  — false until an admin approves
  └── isAdmin     — auto-approves on creation

Workplace
  ├── id, name (e.g. D1), location (e.g. Pod A)
  └── isActive    — inactive desks are hidden

Reservation
  ├── id, workplaceId, employeeEmail, employeeName, date, status
  ├── One active reservation per employee per day
  └── One active reservation per workplace per day

Test layers

Layer	Technology	What it covers
Unit	xUnit	Domain entity logic and business rules in isolation
Integration	xUnit + WebApplicationFactory	HTTP endpoints, JWT/auth middleware, cross-layer wiring, in-process SQLite
E2E	Playwright	Full user journeys through the browser

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Running locally for development

Prerequisites

• .NET 10 SDK
• Node.js 22

1. Start the backend

cd src/backend
dotnet run --project src/Randall.Api

The API starts at http://localhost:5180. On first run it creates randall.db in the working directory, runs migrations, and seeds 16 workplaces and one admin account.

Swagger UI is available at http://localhost:5180/swagger when running in Development mode.

Default admin credentials

Field	Value
Email	admin@randall.local
Password	Admin@123

2. Start the frontend

In a separate terminal:

cd src/frontend
npm install
npm run dev

The app is available at http://localhost:5173. API calls are proxied automatically to the backend — no extra configuration needed.

Running tests locally

Unit tests

dotnet test src/backend/tests/unit/Randall.Domain.UnitTests

Integration tests

dotnet test src/backend/tests/integration/Randall.Api.IntegrationTests

Each integration test class spins up the full API in-process against a temporary SQLite database that is deleted when the test run completes.

E2E tests (requires both backend and frontend to be running)

cd tests/e2e
npm install
npx playwright install chromium
npx playwright test

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Running with Docker

The Docker setup builds and wires both services. From the repo root:

docker compose -f cicd/docker/docker-compose.yml up --build

The app is available at http://localhost (port 80 by default).

To set a custom JWT key, pass it as an environment variable:

JWT_KEY=your-secret-key docker compose -f cicd/docker/docker-compose.yml up --build

See cicd/docker/.env.example for all available options.