phenix-notifications-api
.NET 8 API that sends templated Phenix notification emails (team membership, gold-status and commission-rule events) by rendering Razor templates and dispatching through the legacy WCF mail service.
Health score
0 to 100 across seven weighted factors; nothing is hidden. Green is 75 and above, amber 50 to 74, red below 50. How scoring works.
Facts
| Languages | csharp |
| Frameworks | ASP.NET Core 8, MediatR, RazorEngine.NetCore |
| Runtimes | .NET 8 |
| Tests / CI | some / CI in place |
| Last commit | 2026-05-25 |
| Owner | Owner unknown (mapping to be curated) |
| Domain | Customer communications (system generated; curate in repo-owners.json to override) |
| Product area | Phenix |
| Hosted | On-prem Deployed to our own machines
|
| Releases | 2 release pipeline(s): phenix-notifications-api; phenix-notifications-api stealth |
| Integration | rest, wcf, jwt |
| Source | Open in Azure DevOps |
Dependencies in context
Entanglement
kernel Bound into the core by 2 mechanism(s).
- Pinning dependency: mail-service
- Speaks WCF (client)
Detaches when its pinning dependencies are cut or multi-targeted (mail-service); and when its WCF surface gains a modern interface or its WCF calls move to one.
Depends on / used by
Capability duplication
Part of the Mail sending family (survivor): Built to replace the WCF pair but still delivers through the WCF client; complete the migration
Migration playbooks
Generated from this repo's assessment data: what is feasible, what blocks it, and the steps in order. Ratings: green means actionable now, amber means sequence other work first, red means blocked, grey means not applicable.
ZDD adoption
Ready with guardrailsClose: the deployment path exists, but specific checks are needed first, typically raising tests, auditing serialized data, or respecting a shared schema with expand and contract. Test coverage is thin; ZDD shifts the safety net onto automation.
- 1 system(s) depend on this repo; during a rolling deploy they will talk to old and new versions at once, so responses must stay compatible
- Consumes WCF contract packages: never take a breaking client bump mid-feature, and treat obsolete warnings as migration debt
- Adopt the four-stage discipline from the ZDD engineering standard: pre-deployment compatibility, deployment, feature activation behind a flag, post-release cleanup.
- Raise automated test coverage first: ZDD trades the end-of-sprint manual gate for continuous automated confidence, so the tests are the entry ticket.
- Make every change dual-version safe: backwards-compatible APIs (new major version for breaking wire changes), expand and contract for any schema change, and consumers tolerant of unknown fields.
- Wrap behaviour changes in feature flags so code deploys dark and release becomes a business decision, not a deployment event.
- Route deployments through the Workflow Engine's automated drain, deploy, health-check, return cycle (the path proven by the first automated production run in mid-2026).
- Verify with area-scoped regression rather than the whole-platform cycle, and watch error rates after rollout with automated rollback on alert.
SQL Server exit
Not applicableNo SQL Server dependency is recorded for this repo. Nothing to migrate.
Containerisation
Ready to containeriseModern runtime, no hosted legacy transport: this service can follow the estate's proven container path (Dockerfile, shared pipeline template, ECS via Terraform).
- Add a Dockerfile and make the app read all configuration from environment variables and the secrets manager, never from machine-local files.
- Log to stdout and expose a health check endpoint so ECS can supervise it.
- Adopt the shared ci.yml pipeline template with the container parameters (awsRegion, containerAfterBuild, ecsTerraformRepo), which is exactly how the estate's existing AWS services deploy.
- Define the service in the Terraform repo, deploy to a non-production environment, then shift traffic and disarm the deployment-group release pipeline.
Recommended actions
No specific actions for this repo. It either needs only normal maintenance, or its work is covered by an estate-level action. See the full programme.
Assessment notes
phenix-notifications-api
Purpose
Notification-sending API intended (per its README) to replace the legacy Mail and MailTemplate WCF services. A single MailNotificationController accepts notification requests; MediatR command handlers (new team member, remove team member, team cover, hit/close-to/removed gold, commission rule, commission payment rule) render HTML email bodies from embedded resx/Razor templates and hand them to the mail service.
Tech stack
C# .NET 8 ASP.NET Core with Asp.Versioning, MediatR 12, RazorEngine.NetCore templating over embedded EmailTemplates/EmailStrings/EmailConfigs resources, PhenixAuth JWT authentication scheme, Swashbuckle, TC.Diagnostics health checks, Nerdbank-style version.json versioning, shared Directory.Build.props with the internal Production NuGet feed.
Deployment
prod_application with 2 releases. YAML build (azure-pipelines.yml, shared InternalOSS templates v1.0, SDK 8.x) feeding release pipelines phenix-notifications-api and phenix-notifications-api stealth. Hosted under base path /api/phenixnotifications; New Relic app name configured in live settings.
Dependencies
Internal: TC.ConnectionBroker (+ Api, Wcf) → tc-connectionbroker; TC.Exceptions.WebApiClient → tc-exceptions; TC.Mail.ServiceClient/ServiceContract → mail-service (actual email dispatch); TC.Phenix.CompanyInfo → company-info-api. External: New Relic monitoring.
Data stores
None — the service is stateless; templates are embedded resources and delivery is delegated to the mail service.
Integration points
Inbound REST with JWT auth. Outbound WCF call to the central mail service via the WCF ConnectionBroker — a wcf-client edge on an otherwise modern stack.
Code health
One xUnit test project with nine test files covering every mail command handler — reasonable for the codebase size, though the controller and MailService mapping layer are untested. YAML CI. Actively maintained (last commit 2026-05-25). README is short but real (not boilerplate).
Modernisation risks
Low priority: modern .NET 8, tested, YAML CI. The only legacy edge is the outbound dependency on the WCF mail-service; ironically the service exists to retire the mail/mailtemplate WCF services but still delivers through one. Swapping to the MassTransit-based tc-mail-sender contracts (as phenix-marketing-campaigns-api does) would remove the last WCF hop.