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Flotilla backend

The backend of flotilla is created using ASP.NET. Useful documentation of concepts and features in the .NET frameworks can be found here.

Setup

To set up the backend on Windows/Mac, install visual studio and include the "ASP.NET and web development" workload during install. If you already have visual studio installed, you can open the "Visual Studio Installer" and modify your install to add the workload.

To set up the backend on Linux, install .NET for linux here.
You need to also install the dev certificate for local .NET development on linux.
Follow this guide, for each of the browser(s) you wish to trust it in.
NB: You probably need to run the commands with sudo prefixed to have permission to change them.

For the configuration to be able to read secrets from the keyvault, you will need to have the client secret stored locally in your secret manager.

For the MQTT client to function, the application expects a config variable in the MQTT section called Password, containing the password for the mqtt broker. This must either be stored in a connected keyvault as "Mqtt--Password" or in the ASP.NET secret manager as described in the configuration section.

Automatic environment setup

See Flotilla readme

Manual environment setup

Add the client secret as described in the Configuration Section.

Run

To build and run the app, run the following command in the backend folder:

dotnet run --project api

To change the ports of the application and various other launch settings (such as the Environment), this can be modified in launchSettings.json. Read more about the launchSettings.json file here

Run in Docker

For the backend to work when dockerized, you need to have the client secret exposed as an environment variable named FLOTILLA_CLIENT_SECRET. The best way to do this is to store it in an .env file in the root of the flotilla repository. See Using the “--env-file” option for more information.

To run the backend in docker, run the following command in the root folder of flotilla:

docker compose up --build backend

Test

To unit test the backend, run the following command in the backend folder:

dotnet test

Components

MQTT Client

The MQTT client is implemented in MqttService.cs and runs as an ASP.NET BackgroundService. Each MQTT message has its own class representation, and is linked to its respective topic pattern in MqttTopics.cs. To match incoming topic messages against the topic patterns we use helper functions to convert from the MQTT wildcards to regEx wildcards for the dictionnary lookup.

Each topic then has it's respective event which is triggered whenever a new message arrives in that topic. The list of topics being subscribe to is defined as an array in appsettings.Development.json.

An example of the subscriber pattern for an MQTT event is implemented in MqttEvenHandler.cs.

Configuration

The project has two appsettings files. The base appsettings.json file is for common variables across all environments, while the appsettings.Development.json file is for variables specific to the Dev environments, such as the client ID's for the various app registrations used in development.

The configuration will also read from a configured azure keyvault, which can then be accessed the same way as any other config variables. For this to work you will need to have the client secret stored locally in the secret manager as described below. The client secret (and mqtt password if not connected to keyvault) should be in the following format:

  "AzureAd": {
    "ClientSecret": "SECRET"
  },
  "Mqtt": {
    "Password": "PASSWORD"
  }

Any local secrets used for configuration should be added in the ASP.NET Secret Manager.

Database model and EF Core

Our database model is defined in the folder /backend/api/Database/Models and we use Entity Framework Core as an object-relational mapper (O/RM). When making changes to the model, we also need to create a new migration and apply it to our databases.

Installing EF Core

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef

Adding a new migration

NB: Make sure you have have fetched the newest code from main and that no-one else is making migrations at the same time as you!

  1. Set the environment variable ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT to Development:

     export ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development

  2. Run the following command from /backend/api:

      dotnet ef migrations add AddTableNamePropertyName

    add will make changes to existing files and add 2 new files in backend/api/Migrations, which all need to be checked in to git.

Notes

  • The your-migration-name-here is basically a database commit message.
  • Database__ConnectionString will be fetched from the keyvault when running the add command.
  • add will not update or alter the connected database in any way, but will add a description of the changes that will be applied later
  • If you for some reason are unhappy with your migration, you can delete it with: 
    dotnet ef migrations remove
    Once removed you can make new changes to the model and then create a new migration with add.

Applying the migrations to the dev database

Updates to the database structure (applying migrations) are done in Github Actions.

When a pull request contains changes in the backend/api/Database/Migrations folder, a workflow is triggered to notify that the pull request has database changes.

After the pull request is approved, a user can then trigger the database changes by commenting /UpdateDatabase on the pull request.

This will trigger another workflow which updates the database by apploying the new migrations.

By doing migrations this way, we ensure that the commands themselves are scripted, and that the database changes become part of the review process of a pull request.

Applying migrations to staging and production databases

This is done automatically as part of the promotion workflows (promoteToProduction and promoteToStaging).

Database setup

If reseting database, but still using postgresql (removing old migrations and adding them manually again), you need to manually add some migrations commands for the timeseries db.

Add the following to the top of the first migration's Up() method:

            // MANUALLY ADDED:
            // Adding timescale extension to the database
            migrationBuilder.Sql("CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS timescaledb CASCADE;");
            //

For each of the timeseries tables, add the following to the bottom of the last migration's Up() method:

            migrationBuilder.Sql(
                "SELECT create_hypertable( '\"TIME-TABLE-NAME\"', 'Time');\n"
            );

Example:

            migrationBuilder.Sql(
                "SELECT create_hypertable( '\"RobotBatteryTimeseries\"', 'Time');\n"
            );

Formatting

CSharpier

In everyday development we use CSharpier to auto-format code on save. Installation procedure is described here. No configuration should be required.

Dotnet format

The formatting of the backend is defined in the .editorconfig file.

We use dotnet format to format and verify code style in backend based on the C# coding conventions.

Dotnet format is included in the .NET6 SDK.

To check the formatting, run the following command in the backend folder:

cd backend
dotnet format --severity info --verbosity diagnostic --verify-no-changes --exclude ./api/migrations

dotnet format is used to detect naming conventions and other code-related issues. They can be fixed by

dotnet format --severity info

Monitoring

We use Azure Application Insights to monitor the backend of our application.

We have one application insight instance for each environment. The connection strings for the AI instances are stored in the keyvault.

Authorization

We use role based access control (RBAC) for authorization.

The access matrix looks like this:

Read Only User Admin
Area Read Read CRUD
Deck Read Read CRUD
Plant Read Read CRUD
Installation Read Read CRUD
Echo Read Read CRUD
Missions Read Read CRUD
Robots Read Read CRUD
Robot Models Read Read CRUD
Safe Positions Read Read CRUD
Start Missions Directly ❌ ❌ ✔️
Stop/Pause/Resume Missions ❌ ✔️ ✔️
Localize Robots ❌ ✔️ ✔️
Robot to Safe position ❌ ✔️ ✔️