Saturday, July 30, 2011

GSoC 2011 Melange Testing Project: CP W9 & W10

Hi,

I could not write a blog post for the work I did during last week because of the
the university work and some other factors. This post summarises the work I did in last two weeks.

  Last week, I fixed some tests which were failing due to the recent change done to the mentor property. The tests for soc.modules.gsoc.tasks.test_survey_conversion failed because the models were seeded(Model.put()) by explicitly defining the model properties. This method is definitely not a robust one since if we happen to add other required properties in future, the tests will fail again due to the missing properties while seeding. The solution is to use the data seeder which randomly seeds the properties not mentioned in the properties parameter. If there is no data provider for a property, we can patch the data provider to seed such properties and the tests would run fine. So, I edited the tests for gsoc.tasks.survey_conversion and made them to use data seeder to seed the models.

     I also fixed the profile_utils.createStudent() method which had been bugging me while testing gsoc.views.student_forms. My tests failed 1 out every 7-8 test runs. It was because of the failing access checks which resulted because of the number_of_projects property being seeded other than 0 for a student without a project. This problem bugged me for quite sometime and Madhu helped me to figure out that this was actually the problem. Also, I submitted some patches to remove the unused imports in some modules in gsoc.views.

   This week I tested a couple of views namely views.org_profile, views.profile_show and submitted them for review. Leo has reviewed them and I will be fixing them today. I also added createInactiveProfile() and createInactiveStudent() method to profile_utils which I needed while testing views.org_profile. I discovered a defect in DownloadForm request handler in student_forms and I filed a issue for that. The defect was that a student without a project should not be allowed to download the enrollment and tax forms and in the present case a 500 error is returned which should be 403 instead. As told by Sverre, I need to add an access check to fix this.
 
    Since I get very less time during the week days to work on the project, I will be working on Friday, Saturday and Sunday as I don't have classes on these days.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

GSoC 2011 GUI Overhaul: Uploadable Logo with Area Selection

Hi everyone,

When I discovered a problem with the logo url rendered in the homepage, I believe blobstore for the organization logo will be fine. Yeah, until I took pains with redirect response. So here's the specification to implement image area selection in blobstore, so you can crop the uploaded image:

  1. We need coordinate fields, x1 as a horizontally starting-point where the area selection begins, x2 as horizontally end-point, y1 as vertically starting-point where the area selection begins and y2 as vertically end-point. Since we're using blobstore, we need to set BlobReferenceProperty field.
  2. Create the form similar to the tax or enrollment form, but only set the BlobReferenceProperty field. To make it clear, the uploaded file will be handled by Blobstore API and handover to our written handler afterward. In our handler we can set initial values for coordinate fields and redirect again to upload form.
  3. When the blob key is available, we need another handler to request the blob.
  4. To render the uploaded image in the form, we can follow how Google Map is rendered in the profile form.
  5. Image area selection was implemented using jQuery imgAreaSelect. The documentation is pretty obvious.
  6. There should be coordinate fields update handler which is posted when we made selection over the image. There's onSelectEnd paramater that we can passed over when instantiate imgAreaSelect.
  7. To serve the image with area selection, we need to create a handler that reads the blob based on provided blob key. Resized and cropped image will be manipulated here by using Image API.
I can't give you live demo for uploadable logo. I don't have a dashboard in billing-mode. Here's the screenshot if you're wondering:



Monday, July 25, 2011

GSoC 2011 Integration with External APIs: Melange Lists and GData API Protocol - W9

Hi,
Last week, I started to work on "Melange list exporting to GDocs" that will be second deliverable of my project. I've been searcing through GData Protocol to use JavaScript for  Spreadsheets API. This API is used required to create a spreadsheet and manage it. Unfortunately there isn't a JS API for this provided by Google. But GData APIs are built on REST like protocols over HTTP. This gives possibilty to anyone to use them with any language as long as correct HTTP requests are provided.

Well, we want to use Spreadsheets API with JS, but i haven't tell the reason yet. Reason is we can not trust how big the data is. For example it's quite big enough for accepted stundents page. GAE has a limitatation, max 30 seconds per request. Melange loads some of the lists with multiple requests, but when we want to create and upload a list we can't make it with multiple request (or that would be really harder). So we need to export data on client side.

This also saves time preventing reprocessing of query. Another benefit is that, it allows uploading modified list on client-side. For example, user may filter list for a parameter, or sort it on client side. With this approach we present user a feature like, "what you see is what you export" that is exactly what user wants.