GSoC09: Statistics module 7th weekly report: Organization home page map and fixes

Last week has been an "exciting" one, because Lennie and I worked close together to the common objective of solving a too-old issue of Melange: we've now again (as last year) a cool map for each organization showing the connections between students and mentors!

A nice and obvious example is the Melange organization home page, which shows our own GSoC connections :).


That's been a lot of work, mainly because we had to deal with privacy issues and legal stuff: we couldn't obviously make the exact lat/lon of people publicly available :) So, the agreement is for a "city level" precision, which is something quite vague.

I proposed something more mathematical like losing precision (for example like one decimal, so about 40000 (Earth's circumference) /360 (degrees) /100 = roughly 11 km of precision) on the lat/lon pairs given, but then ... we had obviously to do something definitely compatible with the legal agreement, so...

Lennie ran a script that he made with geopy to reset all lat/lon pairs in Melange to city level and than.. all the suff I made in Javascript (commits 9c7d31b824, c76c9c5916, 40cf7eaa03) in the meantime came to life :)

Also we took care of showing only "one world": if the resolution of the screen was too high, then the div containing the map would have stretched horizontally, showing more than one world :) So I've put the exact dimension of the world (using a specific zoom) to the div (commit 37abba547f). More complications (like zooming exactly to contain each organizations markers without showing the whole world) postponed for later, if needed.

More about Statistics module update: during the last week, apart from talking with Daniel Hans about the steps to be taken for the next last 2 weeks of GSoC, I've fixed some style issues that Pawel pointed out in the dev mailing list (still have to fix what Daniel Hans and Lennie sent).

Then I worked to integrate Google Chart API Visualization to the list of available visualizations, which is needed to do some kind of exporting of the graphs. Problem is that, when I was programming everything I didn't take into account (should have I?) that one visualization can contain "sub-visualizations", because that's what happens with Google Chart Visualization! I mean, the constructor is the same, "ImageChart", but the real kind of chart to be displayed should be put into the options! That led me to change some logic on the JavaScript side and finally also Google Chart are available, showing also an "Export" button (that appears and disappears properly to be shown only when Google Chart Visualization is selected) that basically shows an alert box with the HTML source to be copied and pasted into a page to show that chart.

After that, I worked on a bug that prevented to show the available Visualizations (sent by the cool work on the backend Daniel Hans has made during the week) when the widget was initially created (they were shown only if the dashboard was reloaded). That was a little hard because I had to change some stuff also on the backend to send the data along with the statistic at first, instead of only with the saved chart like it was.

That's all folks! :)