Friday, May 24, 2013

Code Kata: shopping list search

We have a list of, let's say, goods we bought at a shop (or you can imagine any other list that you like):

|        Name        |      Quantity      |       Price      |
|        Beer          |           10          |        30            |
|       Pickles        |           1           |        12            |
|     Red beans    |            2           |        22            |
...

The task is to write a piece of code that will search through the list and will display each row that matches search criteria. Too simple? Maybe. But consider these additional hints:
  • search criteria may not be exact. The string "bean" might match "Red beans"
  • we may even be searching for any of a few items: rows one and three will both match if our search criteria are "any of 'beer', 'bean' ".
I recommend that you start this kata with an exact search for one item and then gradually move towards the "like/contains" criteria and to "any of" criteria and that you observe the impact these changes will have on your unit tests (needless to say, this should all be done using TDD).