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Implement Recipe Storage CRUD

CircleSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
HardSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenCoding & Algorithms

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This question evaluates the ability to design and implement in-memory data structures and APIs for CRUD operations, covering skills such as ID generation and parsing, string handling for case-insensitive uniqueness constraints, data modeling, and preserving original value casing.

Implement an in-memory RecipeStore that supports CRUD operations for recipes.

Each recipe contains:

  • id: a string identifier in the form recipe<n>
  • name: the recipe name
  • ingredients: a list of strings
  • steps: a list of strings

Implement these methods:

  • create(name, ingredients, steps) -> string
  • get(recipeId) -> Recipe | null
  • update(recipeId, updatedRecipe) -> bool
  • delete(recipeId) -> bool

Required behavior:

  1. IDs are assigned sequentially starting from 1 and exposed as recipe1, recipe2, and so on.
  2. get, update, and delete receive the id as a string such as recipe2. You must parse the numeric suffix to find the stored recipe. If the format is invalid, the operation fails.
  3. Recipe names are unique in a case-insensitive way. For example, Pasta and pAsTa should be treated as the same logical name, so both cannot exist at the same time.
  4. Preserve the stored casing of the name when returning a recipe. If a recipe was created as PaSta, get must return PaSta.
  5. update succeeds only if recipeId matches updatedRecipe.id.
  6. During update, the name may change only by letter case. For example, PaSta to pasta is allowed, but PaSta to Noodles is not.
  7. If a case-only rename is accepted, future reads should return the new casing.
  8. Updating or deleting a non-existent recipe should fail.

Design appropriate data structures and implement the methods so common operations are efficient.