Requirements

Let's refine our eBay-like billing and auctioning system. We need to model a system that handles auctions, bidding, and billing of users, focusing on extensibility and maintainability, while also handling concurrent access to auction data. The goal is to create a robust and scalable solution that adheres to SOLID principles, design patterns, and can support diverse auction types (e.g., English auction, Dutch auction) and billing strategies. Imagine you're building the core auctioning and billing engine, responsible for ensuring fair auctions and accurate charges. # Requirements ## Functional Requirements * **User Management:** * Ability to create and manage user accounts, including storing contact information and billing details. * Support different user roles (e.g., seller, bidder, administrator). * **Auction Management:** * Ability to create and manage auctions with different types of auctions (English, Dutch, etc). * Auctions should have a defined start and end time. * Auctions should support reserve prices, increment amounts, and other auction-specific parameters. * **Bidding:** * Allow users to place bids on auctions. * Implement different bidding strategies (e.g., automatic bidding, proxy bidding). * The system should ensure that bids are valid (e.g., higher than the current highest bid, within the auction timeframe). * Handle concurrent bids from multiple users. * **Auction End and Winner Determination:** * Determine the winner of an auction when it ends. * Notify the winner and the seller of the outcome. * Handle cases where there are no bids. * **Billing:** * Generate invoices for successful auctions. * Support different payment methods (e.g., credit card, PayPal). * Process payments and update the auction status. * Calculate fees (e.g., commission fees) based on auction results. * **Reporting:** * Generate reports on auction activity, bidding patterns, and billing information. * **Search:** * Ability to search auctions based on title, category, and other criteria. * Search should scale to many auctions. * **Notifications:** * Send notifications to users about auction events, like bid updates, auction ending soon, and winning bids. * **Support for different currency:** * All monetary values have currency context. ## Non-Functional Requirements * **Thread Safety:** The system must handle concurrent access to auctions and bidding data without data corruption or race conditions. Employ appropriate synchronization mechanisms. * **Extensibility:** The design should allow for easy addition of new auction types, bidding strategies, payment methods, and reporting formats without major code changes. Use design patterns to achieve this. * **Modularity:** The system should be divided into loosely coupled modules with well-defined interfaces, promoting code reuse and maintainability. * **Testability:** The code should be easily testable, with clear separation of concerns and the ability to mock dependencies. * **Maintainability:** The code should be well-documented and easy to understand and modify. Follow coding standards and best practices. * **Scalability:** The system should be able to handle a large number of users, auctions, and bids. (This is addressed through good LLD in terms of design patterns.) * **Error Handling:** Implement robust error handling to gracefully manage exceptions and prevent system crashes. * **Data Integrity:** Ensure data consistency and accuracy throughout the auction and billing processes. Use appropriate validation and transaction management. * **Performance:** The system should respond quickly to user requests, such as placing bids and searching for auctions. (Algorithm efficiency is key). ## Core Entities * **User:** Represents a user of the system, with attributes like ID, username, password, billing information, and role. * **Auction:** Represents an auction, with attributes like ID, title, description, start time, end time, reserve price, current highest bid, seller, and auction type. It contains a collection of bids. * **Bid:** Represents a bid placed on an auction, with attributes like ID, bidder, bid amount, and timestamp. * **AuctionType:** Represents the type of auction (e.g., English, Dutch). This can be an enum or an interface, defining the bidding rules and winner determination logic. * **BillingInfo:** Represents the billing information associated with a user, including payment method and billing address. * **PaymentMethod:** Represents a payment method, such as credit card or PayPal. Abstract class for payment processing. * **Invoice:** Represents an invoice for a successful auction, with attributes like ID, auction, winner, amount due, and payment status. * **Currency:** Represents the currency used in the auction. * **Report:** Abstract class representing reporting functionalities. * **Search:** Abstract class representing search functionalities.

Design a billing and auctioning system similar to EBay.

Requirements

Think like an Architect

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