Coding Tracker

A console-based productivity application to log and manage coding sessions, developed with C#, SQLite, Dapper, and Spectre.Console.

Features

• Live Session Timer: Start an interactive coding session with a live-updating Spectre console display showing elapsed time in real-time.
• Manual Logging: Add past coding sessions manually with strict input parsing.
• Session History & Management: View recorded sessions formatted in clean CLI tables.
• Full CRUD Operations: Create, Read, Update, and Delete sessions with immediate ID validation.

Architecture & Code Structure

The project strictly follows the Single Responsibility Principle and separation of concerns:

• CodingSession: Data model representing a coding session, storing timestamps and calculating durations.
• CodingController: Handles database persistence and executes parameterized SQL queries using Dapper.
• UserInterface: Manages menu flows, screen outputs, and table renderings via Spectre.Console.
• UserInput: Centralizes console input collection, menu prompts, and buffer management.
• Validation: Enforces constraints, positive integer parsing, and date-time validation (dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss).
• TimeCalculator: Helper logic for calculating differences between session timestamps.

Technologies Used

• C# / .NET
• SQLite (Microsoft.Data.Sqlite)
• Dapper (Micro-ORM for parameterized queries)
• Spectre.Console (CLI rendering and interactive prompts)
• Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration (Database connection string via appsettings.json)

Thought Process

• Architecture First: Before writing business logic, I mapped out dedicated responsibilities (CodingController for persistence, UserInput for prompts, Validation for parsing) to ensure maintainability and clean data flow.
• User Experience: Console apps often suffer from clunky navigation. By leveraging Spectre.Console, I focused on clear table layouts, real-time visual feedback for active sessions, and defensive input parsing to prevent runtime crashes.
• Data Integrity: Enforcing strict timestamp formats and parameterized queries via Dapper was prioritized early to avoid malformed session records in SQLite.

Configuration

Ensure appsettings.json contains a valid SQLite connection string:

{
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "DefaultConnection": "Data Source=codingTracker.db"
  }
}