Matching API crashes when no value passed in for birth date or last name

[gregmundy]

Last name and date of births are two required fields; however, in the event that the end-user does not provide this data, the matching API should gracefully fail. In the event of no birth date, the API throws a SQLAlchemy error and does not generate a response. In the event of no last name, the algorithm will generate a brand new MCI entry with null as the last name.

[reginafcompton]

@gregmundy and I discussed this. We concluded that:

If a user does not provide a last_name or date_of_birth, then by default the master-client-index should create a new user – without POSTing to the matching service. (Currently, we cannot imagine a DTA wanting a match-score threshold lower than 0.8.)

In other words, this query should never raise an error:

mci-matching-service/matching/common/util.py

Lines 63 to 66 in f790300

	potential_matches = Session.query(individual_table).filter_by(
	last_name=individual_args['last_name'],
	date_of_birth=individual_args['date_of_birth']
	)

However, it might be worthwhile to add exception handling, at this point – just in case.