Car Dealership - School Assignment

Introduction

This project is a modern web application developed with Spring Boot and Spring MVC. Its purpose is to manage a collection of cars in a dealership's system. The application uses HTML pages (Thymeleaf/JTE) for the user interface, where users can perform CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete).

Features

The application supports the following functionality:

• List all cars: An overview page displaying all cars in stock.
• Create new cars: A form to add a new car with validation.
• Update cars: The ability to edit information for an existing car.
• Delete cars: A function to remove a car from the system.
• Validation: Clear error messages in forms if data is missing or incorrect.

Domain Model (Entity)

Class: Car Data is persisted in the database via JPA. A car entity includes at least:

• ID: (Auto-generated)
• Brand: The car's manufacturer (e.g., Volvo)
• Model: The car's model name (e.g., V60)
• Description: A short text about the car
• Year: The car's manufacturing year
• Registration Number: (Domain-specific attribute)

Layered Architecture

The application is divided into the following layers for a clean structure:

1. Repository: CarRepository (Extends ListCrudRepository, handles database communication).
2. Service: CarService (Handles business logic and calls the Repository).
3. Controller: CarController (Handles HTTP requests and returns HTML views).

DTO Pattern & Mapper

To separate the database model from what is displayed or submitted in forms, DTOs are used:

• CreateCarDTO: Used in the form when creating a car.
• UpdateCarDTO: Used in the form when updating a car.
• CarDTO: Used to display car data in lists.
• Mapper: A class that converts data between the Car (Entity) and the DTOs.

Tech Stack

• Framework: Spring Boot, Spring MVC
• Database: Spring Data JPA (with e.g., H2 or MySQL)
• Validation: Jakarta Bean Validation (Hibernate Validator)
• Views: HTML with Thymeleaf (or JTE)
• Testing: JUnit, Mockito

To-Do (Workflow)

1. Create Car entity and CarRepository.
2. Create Service layer and Mapper.
3. Implement Controller and HTML views (List, Create, Update, Delete).
4. Add validation and error handling.
5. Write unit tests.