You are asked to design a reusable product surface that organizes items into groups by category. The specification must include a data model and API contract in which each attribute consumed by the interface has an explicit, unambiguous role and remains consistent with the rest of the system.
For this practice exercise, constrain the model as follows: an item belongs to one category only; every item has a stable identifier, a title, and an optional description. Treat the case where one item can appear in multiple categories as a separate, later iteration.
Clarifying questions to consider:
- Could an item be assigned to more than one category?
- Should categories support parent-child nesting?
- Which users or roles are allowed to create, update, or delete items?
- What sort order should the list use, and what pagination method should the API expose?
- If a category is removed, what should happen to its items?
A complete discussion should cover:
- Explicit identities and associations between categories and items.
- Separate endpoints for browsing a collection and fetching one resource's details.
- Validation rules that keep payloads and client-side state reliable.
- A pagination strategy, preferably cursor-based for stable scrolling.
- A clear deletion policy, such as cascade, restrict, or detach.
- How the frontend should update cached category lists after mutations.
Follow-up questions:
- How do you make an API payload use category IDs rather than category display labels when the client expects machine-readable identifiers?
- What parts of the schema and endpoints change if categories and items become many-to-many?
- After an item is edited, how should cached lists and category grouping be refreshed or invalidated?
Summary:
Deliver a category-and-item list system with coherent resource schemas, clear membership rules, cursor-based pagination, input validation, an explicit deletion strategy, and a client cache update mechanism.