GSoC 2011 Integration with External APIs: GSoC ends with great experiences

Hi,

We came into the end of Summer of Code 2011. It was one of the best collaborative development environments i've ever been before. I learned lots of stuff especially about Google Data APIs, OAuth, Javascript, Rest structure . I improved my code writing skills for more beautiful Python code. I worked with very nice and smart people. I tried to look problems like from their perspectives which  led me better reasoning against problems. As a result, it was a long but short summer that I spent my most of my time in front of my computer, but that was really fun. I own special thanks to my mentor Mario and co-mentor Madhusudan for spending quite amount of their time with my problems, reviews and newbie questions.

Last week was a little rush for me. I worked on Carol's issue about shipment trackings. Program administrator wants to share some spreadsheets that holds shipment tracking numbers, notes, address for students. A task for this spreadsheet is going to run and data will be synced to Melange datastore so student will be able to see the shipments sent for them in the dashboard page. We hope it will be used for the final shipments this year.

That's a video i captured for its initial state:

GSoC 2011 GUI Overhaul: Generic Iconic Dashboard

Hi everyone,

This week I need to post remaining patches, especially the generic iconic dashboard. I just posted early so I can have much time iterating the review process and hopefully got the patches submitted this week. The generic dashboard class is now placed in app/soc/views/dashboard.py. It contains the underlying view base for iconic dashboard. Every nested-iconic-dashboard should be inherited from Dashboard class. You can take a loot at admin.py, dashboard.py and org_admin_dashboard.py views to get the idea how to use Dashboard class. Now all related base dashboard templates were placed in v2/soc/dashboard directory. It contains the base.html and _user_action.html. All stylesheet rules should be defined inside v2/gsoc/dashboard.css.

There were changes on the melange.list and melange.dependency JS after refactoring the dashboard. The changes were to hold the lists to be queued and executed when the lists were rendered inside the dashboard. After applying the changes, I run the test and it broke in the test_admin.py. I figure out the case immediately, should be the assertTemplate. Yeah, there were some templates removed and added. After fixing the test, I post all the patches and ping Daniel. I hope I can run fast for the review process ;)

GSoc 2011 : Melange Testing Project CP W12 Last Week

Hi,

Only a week is left for GSoC to end and I need to finish testing all the important views as soon as possible. I had been working on views.org_profile, profile_show, accepted_orgs, proposal_review, duplicates and proposal_review this week. Testing views is turning out to be a little more involved and complicated task as compared to testing the logic. I got stuck at some places and so could not submit them for review. I had thought that I would be able to finish the views much earlier and start functional testing but I was not fast enough and also I could not devote 10+ hours per day during the weekends as I had promised in the proposal due to heavy course work, classes and personal issues.

      I will be trying to commit as much tests as possible in this week and work on the remaining tests after GSoC. I aim to work on functional testing and buildbot after GSoC. Lets hope for the best :).

GSoC 2011 GUI Overhaul: What's Left

Hi everyone,

The GSoC 2011 program will end shortly. Last week I was working on the account management, assign host, adding evaluation group and dashboard. There's a problem with Django test client that I couldn't figure out. The handler always treat self.data.POST as regular dict for every requests (in my case via POST) made from Django test client. Since in validate method there's a line that expect QueryDict instance, by calling getlist method self.data.POST.getlist('assign_program'), the test always fail. Maybe I missed something here, so I read the client.py code from Django that comes along with Google App Engine SDK. It took me two days or more to trace this problem. I don't think we should remove getlist from the handler nor hacking the django test client. So, I left the test ATM and move to another to do list, that's it, the dashboard.

The dashboard will be moved to soc/views/helpers/dashboard.py and the code itself is self explanatory:

class Dashboard(Template):

"""Base dashboard for admin page

"""



def __init__(self, request, data, subpages=None):

 """Initializes the dashboard.



 Args:

   request: The HTTPRequest object

   data: The RequestData object

   subpages: Subpages of current dashboard

 """

 self.request = request

 self.data = data

 self.subpages = subpages



def getSubpagesLink(self):

 """Returns the link to other dashboard that appears

 on top of the dashboard.

 """

 return self.subpages



def templatePath(self):

 """Returns the path to the template that should be used in render()

 """

 return 'v2/modules/gsoc/dashboard/dashboard.html'



def _divideSubPages(self, subpages):

 """Returns the subpages divided into two columns.

 """

 middle_ceil = int(math.ceil(float(len(subpages))/2))



 return [

     subpages[:middle_ceil],

     subpages[middle_ceil:],

 ]

The templates is improved to be able to handle list components that we have seen from regular dashboard. I hope the patch will be posted for reviewing process lately this week and pushed before the program ends.

GSoC 2011 Melange Testing Project: CP W11

Hi,

I worked I tested gsoc.views.duplicates module. I have not submitted my tests which I wrote for org_profile, profile_show and student_forms for review as there is a need of some access checks to be defined new for the respective module in the codebase. I was rechecking my tests for org_profile and I felt that the timeline should also be checked if a program is active or not. I put this in the mailing list and Lennard suggested that isProgramActive be renamed to isProgramVisible and a new method isProgramRunning be introduced. Those pages which remain active after gsoc can include isProgramVisible in their access checks and which are current program specific can include isProgramRunning. I submitted the patch for the access checks and Lennard and Sverre reviewed them. I will be accommodating the changes soon.
    
There was also a problem with our coverage module which is outdated and so it does not work with the latest Nose 1.1.2. I reported the issue with Nose and they suggested that we use coverage > 3.0. Leo tried including it in the buildout dependencies so that the coverage module is always the latest but it too did not work. Just replacing the old coverage module with the latest coverage modules works fine.

GSoC 2011 Integration with External APIs: Proxy Url and Exporting Lists - W11

My final decision about cross-domain requests: They can be headache. Especially if your requests are bound on some headers. There are new recommendations for this like "Cross Origin Resource Sharing". But this is so new to apply because it makes your application browser dependent. There are still many users on internet using ancient browsers and we can't force them to use latest version of specific browsers.  Also server we're trying to access must support this. Because we actually asking server if it accepts some parameters, headers etc. Besides this, jsonp and script methods may be enough for lots of purposes. But to make oauth authenticated requests to gdata server, it wasn't. So i changed my approach. I saw oauth gadgets use  the same approach: providing a proxy url on same domain that serves as a gateway and removes all cross-domain concerns.

That proxy url doesn't care about what request does. It just takes method, gdata server, url, data, headers as parameters and makes a request to gdata server and returns response directly to the client.

After resolving cross-domain request problem, i started to develop "list exporting" feature. For now i'm able to create an empty spreadsheet when user clicks "export to spreadsheet" button. Here are some screenshots of current state:

Button for exporting:

 







Uploading may take time, so it's stressed in a dialog window.

After upload complete, user may click to see the document:

Document is exported with the name of the list:

GSoC 2011 GUI Overhaul: More Handlers for PA

Hi everyone,

GSoC is near to the final evaluation and I in a run to catch all my TODO. Last week, I wrote some handlers for PA to manage account and assign a user to be a host. PA can assign programs to be hosted by particular user in edit user page. Here's how it looks:



The code is somewhat similar to assign_mentors.py and project_details.py. To set a user as a host, PA needs:

1. Given an account to be set as a host, go to the Lookup page in the admin dashboard.
2. If the account is found then click the "Edit user" link
3. In the edit user form, there's a box at the bottom (see picture above) that contains program selection. To set multiple programs to be hosted by the user, click "Add new" link. If done with the selection, click the "SET AS A HOST" button

Actually there's some features that I've in mind such as add / edit sponsor, programs list that contains list of program name and its hosts as cols, page to view readonly program that in inactive state, and of course the page to create new program. I'll hold thus things for a moment because the dashboard is still being refactored and I promised to finish it by Aug 6th. I am late two days here.