With the recent addition of 4 new products, I have added a new field to the data titled 'ingredients'. It is located just underneath the nutrition section of each product. So far, 4/58 products have ingredients included. The rest have the field, but it is empty.

The ingredients need to be displayed for the rest of the products.

There is a need for a master list of every item in the data file. This list needs to be alphabetized and easily searchable.

This list would not only give a quick reference, but it would also create a way to see if something has already been entered to avoid duplicate items.

As the data set is growing larger and larger, I think it would be a good idea to alphabetize things like categories and brands so they can be found easier.

Target files:
The Readme has lists of categories and brands that need to be organized as well as the masterList in the data folder.

I think it would be a good idea to add a data layout to the Readme. It would be nice to show what the data looks like, so the users can see what is exactly included and how to work with it.

There is an increasing need for more and more smaller categories with the addition of new products. Some categories should be split down with smaller tags added.

For example, a pack of sliced cheese could have a category of dairy, cheese, sliced, etc.
This is going to take some time to add.

There is a need for some sort of shelf life for each product. It would be very beneficial to add in a shelf life data value to each product.

This would open up the possibility of items being removed from the database if their shelf life has been passed and possibly moved to clearance if it is close to end of life.

I think it would be beneficial to have some sort of external search program. This way, anyone could easily search the database and have possible categories and brands all in the program without needing to make separate calls for each search.

I think it would be cool to have a stats route for development purposes and admin purposes.

This stats route would be a route for developers to see how much data/brands/categories/prices are contained in the database.
It would also be pretty nice to have a stats route so that a possible admin dashboard could use this data to see basic stats on the data.

Now that the database of items is further growing, I think it would be a good idea to refactor some things to make it easier for the end user to parse the data.

One thing I would like to add is to combine all of the data into a single document. There are just way too many files. Splitting up the files makes it easier to find and add new items, but it makes it less uniform.

I would also like to add a single route maybe with parameters. These parameters would sort the data based off of category, price, size, nutrition, etc.

Another thing I would like to change is the uniformity of the data. As it stands, a lot of the data is not the same. There are pieces missing and other pieces that are completely new. One thing is the serving size. Instead of having one attribute saying amount, there are multiple data types for cups, pieces, grams, etc. I would like to combine these into one so that anyone using this API can easily parse the data for their project.

The final thing I am looking to implementing is proper versioning. There is no proper versioning and I would like to introduce that.

Find a way to implement env variables in the JSON data files. Every image link is hard coded as localhost, since the images are hosted on the same server. Env variables would allow for easier deployment outside of the local machine.

When I made a request to the default food route with no search parameters, I get the names of the items. Then, when I make a request with parameters, I get no names of products, just the data associated with the products.

To fix this it might be a good idea to split up the data and create a name attribute.

There needs to be something in place to distinguish between hot/cold items.

In a real world situation, the website admins may need to know if an item requires special temperature regulation. It may also be useful when it comes to shipping to possibly calculate an extra dry ice cost or thermal box cost to keep the item at its desired temperature.

I imagine this could easily be implemented with two new data values per product specifying hot or cold, with a Boolean value. This would be best added now, before the data set grows too large.

After including the temperature values into each item, I think it would be a good idea to include this in a search.

There are some cases when there may be a frozen foods sale or something similar. Maybe at the end of the day all of the hot chicken is sold at discount. This presents an issue, because as it stands, there is no way to search through the data based on temperature.

Adding a route parameter for searching based on temperature would be beneficial.