Sixth/Seventh Week Status Update

It appears as though there are now some diffs about which week we're on! Depends on whether we're indexing from 0 or 1?

This week I find myself working on two different tasks with a very similar theme.

The first task is in the News Feed module. When we generate a feed item, we're doing it on the logic side. the onCreate, onUpdate, and onDelete hooks that are used to create the feed item is in the model logic layer, and the feed item process itself (now being converted to a scheduled Task) is also in the logic layer.

However, the payload for a certain feed item requires access to view params in many cases so that model-specific payload templates can be re-used to render the payload for the activity item.

And you could say, "yes logic can't retrieve from view, but isn't the view retrieving from the logic anyways?" This is true, and this is why normally this is not a problem. But the problem arises when the view for one model type (site) wants to access view params for another model type (document, or survey).

This is also a challenge for the view for org admins to view the results from the manage a student project page. In this situation, the view model is for StudentProject, but the most obviously DRY approach would be to also instantiate a view class for survey view models so that we could render a list of ProjectSurveys or GradingProjectSurveys.

Short version: the view layer seems somewhat impenetrable from the logic layer, as it is tied up in the HTTP request. As a view should be. But what do we do about these edge cases?

I've been impressed with the orthognalness (is that a word?) of Melange, so it's entirely possible that I haven't yet figured out how to properly instantiate a view from the logic -- or why I don't want to do that in the first place.


On an unrelated note, another good learning experience has been in how I've been thinking about privacy in regard to how news feed activity can be consumed. While at first I was mostly alright with the idea of generating a hash key for hard-to-guess URLs. But the news feed activity is mostly HTML, content, and key words. In other words, if we're not careful, it could very easily end up crossing paths with a robot (edit: not if we set our robots.txt correctly!).

Statistic module: seventh week update

This is my update of the work I did during the last week.

Basically it was a pretty intensive week. Not only was it time of midterm evaluations and we were expected to show 'a working demo', but also we were integrating the statistic dashboard page with Python backend which was not a piece of cake for me, as it required a lot of JavaScript/jQuery work.

Let me describe shortly what was achieved in this area. Before that week the statistic dashboard page had already some functionalities: users could create new widgets, but they could only move them. After the page was reloaded, they always appeared in the third column in random order. The first feature that I added was an option to collapse widgets so that the user could shrink the ones which he or she did not need.
Here is an example of standard widget:

And here you can see how the widget looks when it is collapsed.

As you may also notice, the widgets below are moved upwards.

The second thing was to allow users to remove widgets from their dashboards. One may not want to have the widgets forever... Now they may be easily and intuitively removed by pressing X button in the upper right corner.
At that point it was already good: we have to important functionalities added, but they were still worth next to nothing, because the results were gone whenever the dashboard page was reloaded. Therefore it was the most important issue, to have all the settings being downloaded from server and saved on server if something changed. Of course it all had to be done in AJAXy way, because the whole point of the dashboard page is that the page should not be reloaded. jQuery requests were used and I have to admit that I am quite impressed by them after I got to know them.
The next thing was to remember widget positions, as we could create them, remove or collapse, but they always reappeared in the third column in random order :-) Once I got to know that sortable library can handle events that are triggered after movements are finished, It was simple to remember column changes. I had some problems with positions in columns, but after Mario showed me Firefox tools like DOM Inspector which allows to see real DOM structure, it got easier :-) Thank you for that! :-)
As a result, all changes that a user makes are saved on server, so you can do whatever you want and you should see the same dashboard after reloading the page.

Then I was working for some time on adding support for Task Queue API for Melange. I know it is not a part of statistic module, but in my opinion it is important for the whole project. Basically, I took care of comments that were sent by Pawel. There is just one thing I had to do, so probably I will send a new patch tomorrow.

I also started to work on abstraction of statistic gathering functions. It is almost ready, but I will describe it more in the next week, because I expect some changes.

Tomorrow I am also going to send the first patches for the statistic module. After they are reviewed I hope to push them to the main repository.

GSoC 2009: GHOP - Seventh Week Status update!

Hello everyone,
Last week has not been so very productive. Since last week was midterm evaluations week, I updated my demo instance and pushed some new patches my patch queue at bitbucket.

I started out this week with smoothing out some of the issues related to Students Task claim, like putting message headers about the status of the task among other things. The task page shows if the task is open/reopened to be claimed, claimed. If claimed by the student viewing the page it provides the functionality to withdraw from the task.

Other than this I have spent this week, mostly reading Task Queue API docs, existing Task API examples and code, trying out few small snippets outside Melange. Other than that I have mostly spent this week, fixing bugs (505s) that Lennie used to show in my demo instance while reviewing, repairing the Taggable-mixin patch to be integrated into Melange(have also sent the patches the dev list) and implementing small functionalities Lennie suggested on the dev list.

In the next week, I will be working on adding Task API code to automatically update the status and deadlines of the task and mentors/OrgAdmins side of Task management like, "Accept Student claim", "Reject Student Claim" and related things. If possible I will start working on the commenting infrastructure for Tasks.