Summary

Today’s work focused on aligning the project with the intended business flow: guest checkout with email OTP validation, instead of traditional user registration/login. The backend, schema, and cart payload were cleaned up to remove account-based flow and enforce a consistent transaction model.

What changed

• Removed the account-based auth flow from the project.
  • No more users table in the database.
  • No more login and register endpoints.
• Kept the guest checkout path as the only legitimate order flow.
  • Customer browses without logging in.
  • Customer enters name, phone, and email on checkout.
  • Email OTP is sent and validated before the order is placed.
• Fixed the order schema to match the real business model.
  • orders.customer_phone is used as the canonical phone field.
  • orders.total remains the canonical total value.
• Refined the order item model.
  • order_items now stores either menu_id or product_id, never both.
  • This avoids the earlier issue where product_id was effectively a stringly-typed placeholder and not a real product reference.
• Resolved cart identity collisions.
  • Menu and product items can share the same numeric id, so the cart now distinguishes them using item_type.
• Created a separate seed.sql file for catalog data.
  • Schema file now defines structure only.
  • Seed file loads initial menu and product records.

Key architecture decision

The system now follows a single contract:

• Guest checkout only
• Email OTP verification required before order placement
• Orders stored in orders
• Line items stored in order_items
• Each order item references either:
  • a menu item, or
  • a product item

This avoids duplicated and confusing legacy fields such as phone, total_amount, and users authentication.

Validation

I verified the JavaScript syntax for the changed backend and cart code:

• node --check passed for the modified JavaScript files.
• No editor errors were reported for the updated route and cart logic.

Notes / Follow-up

The remaining operational step is database migration/import:

• recreate the local MariaDB database
• import the cleaned schema
• import the seed file
• start the app and test the OTP checkout flow end-to-end