Overview

Purpose

A single-page web dashboard for reviewing one date's race meetings at a glance: a grid of meeting x race number, colored/badged to surface data problems before race day (missing or duplicate jockeys, missing trainers, bad/duplicate tab numbers, bad or clashing scheduled times, abandoned meetings). Clicking a race cell shows full runner-level detail in a popup. Built for Thoroughbred, Harness, and Greyhound meetings (shown as separate tabs).

Repository: https://github.com/QuantumDataGroup/Race-Day-Dashboard.git

Architecture

• Backend: Node.js + Express (server.js). Reads race/meeting documents from MongoDB and renders server-side HTML (no client framework, no build step).
• Core logic: raceView.js is deliberately kept free of the MongoDB driver and Express so it stays plain-data-in/HTML-string-out and trivially unit-testable. It builds the per-discipline schedule, computes every "issue" flag (missing/duplicate jockey, tab-number problems, missing trainer, bad schedule time), and renders the dashboard/login pages by filling {{PLACEHOLDER}} tokens in static HTML templates (views/dashboard.html, views/login.html) with the dynamic fragments (meeting rows, discipline tabs, country options, etc.) it builds from the DB data.
• Styling: all CSS lives in public/styles.css, served statically by Express (express.static) rather than embedded in the JS.
• Data: MongoDB races and meetings collections, read-only. Connection string comes from an external db.json config file (same format/loader used by other QDG tools), never committed to the repo.
• Auth: a single shared username/password (bcrypt-hashed) protects only the / dashboard route via an Express session cookie; report downloads, /api/race/:id, and /health are intentionally left open.

Components

File	Role
server.js	Express app: routes, MongoDB queries/projections, session/login, CSV/XLSX/PDF report generation (via exceljs/pdfkit)
raceView.js	Pure logic: schedule building, issue detection, HTML rendering (unit-testable, no DB/Express dependency)
db-config.js	Shared loader for the external MongoDB config file/connection string, also used by other QDG CLI tools against the same DB
setup-auth.js	One-time/rerunnable CLI (node setup-auth.js) to set the dashboard's shared username/password; writes only a bcrypt hash, never the plaintext, to a config file outside the repo
views/dashboard.html, views/login.html	Static HTML page skeletons with {{PLACEHOLDER}} tokens, filled in by raceView.js
public/styles.css	All page CSS, served statically
run.bat	Windows launcher: installs npm deps if missing, starts server.js in its own console window, opens the dashboard in Chrome (or default browser)

Development

• No test suite or test script currently exists in package.json.
• raceView.js's DB/Express-free design is intentional so its schedule-building and issue-flagging logic can be exercised with plain sample data.
• Config paths (DB_CONFIG_PATH, AUTH_CONFIG_PATH) default to files under C:\Users\Dinesh\projects-config\, outside the project folder, so credentials are never at risk of being committed.

Operations

Key environment variables (all optional, with defaults baked into server.js):

• PORT (default 3000)
• DB_CONFIG_PATH (default C:\Users\Dinesh\projects-config\db.json)
• AUTH_CONFIG_PATH (default C:\Users\Dinesh\projects-config\auth.json)
• DB_CONNECTION_NAME (default mongodb-prod) -- selects which named entry in db.json to use

Main endpoints:

• GET / (login required) -- the dashboard grid; query params ?date=YYYY-MM-DD and ?includeTrials=true
• GET /login, POST /login, GET /logout -- shared single-account session login
• GET /api/race/:id -- runner-level detail for one race, as JSON (open, no login)
• GET /report.{csv,xlsx,json,pdf}?date=... -- cross-discipline issues report for one date (open)
• GET /meeting-report.{csv,xlsx,json,pdf}?date=...&meeting=...&country=...&discipline=... -- full race+runner detail for one meeting (open)
• GET /health -- DB connectivity check (open)

Until node setup-auth.js has been run once on the host machine, nobody can log in (the server still starts and /health still works).