Managing Product Reviews and Data Aggregation in Java

Hello, and welcome to today's lesson! Today, we are going to dive into the world of managing product reviews and applying data aggregation in practice. We will start with a relatively simple Starter Task to set up our base and then gradually build up to a more complex solution involving data aggregation. Let's jump in!

Starter Task Methods

For our starter task, we will lay the foundation by implementing basic operations for managing product reviews. These are the methods we will need to implement:

  • addReview(String productId, String reviewId, String reviewText, int rating) — adds a review to the product specified by productId. If a review with reviewId already exists, it updates the existing review. The review contains a flagged field, which indicates whether the review is marked as inappropriate (by default, this field is set to false). Returns true if the review was added or updated successfully, false otherwise.

  • getReview(String productId, String reviewId) — returns the review details (reviewText, rating, and flagged fields) for the review specified by reviewId under the given productId. If the review or product does not exist, returns null.

  • deleteReview(String productId, String reviewId) — deletes the review specified by under the given . Returns if the review was deleted, otherwise.

Starter Task Implementation

Let's look at the code that implements these functionalities:

Advanced Functions and Data Aggregation

With our basic review management system in place, we will now introduce new methods to handle more complex operations, such as flagging inappropriate reviews and aggregating review data for a specific product.

Here are the new methods we will add:

  • flagReview(String productId, String reviewId) — this method flags a specific review as inappropriate for a given product. Returns true if the review was successfully flagged, false otherwise.

  • aggregateReviews(String productId) — this method aggregates review data for a given product, providing statistics such as the total number of reviews, the number of flagged reviews, the average rating, and review texts excluding flagged ones. If the product does not have any reviews or does not exist, returns null.

Step 1: Adding the flagReview Method

First, let's add functionality to flag a review:

In this step, we are adding the flagReview method to our ReviewManager class. This method enables users to mark a specific review as inappropriate. It checks whether the product and review exist in the dataset, and if they do, it sets the Flagged attribute of the review to true. This flagging mechanism is crucial for maintaining the quality and appropriateness of the reviews in the system.

Step 2: Adding the aggregateReviews Method

Next, we will implement the method to aggregate reviews:

Conclusion

Great job! Today, you have learned how to manage product reviews and apply data aggregation in practice. We started with basic operations for adding, retrieving, and deleting reviews. Then, we extended our functionality to include flagging reviews and aggregating review data. This gradual build-up demonstrates how to enhance features incrementally and handle more complex data aggregation tasks.

Feel free to practice solving similar challenges to strengthen your skills further. Keep coding, and see you in the next lesson!

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