Hello everyone, Since my last report, a lot of visible changes have been made. First, if you edit the value of any of the text inputs on the dashboard table, your changes will be saved when you hit the submit button. This feature still needs a bit of work though. For example, I noticed during testing that if you submit the form multiple times, you will sometimes end up with approximately duplicate entries in the changes file (the file that stores user-submitted changes to the table). I also need to implement some checks to ensure that the values submitted are actually valid (i.e. we probably only want to allow a few possible values for the 'status' column).
Another big improvement is the addition of a graph at the bottom of each project's page. This graph tracks the number of open tasks versus time. The graph is re-generated once each day based on a 'progress' file. This file simply lists a date and the number of open tasks on each line. While the graph does correctly show a line tracking the progress, it still has some issues to sort out. For example, the x-axis does not properly display a time increment. Work on the graph was blocked for a while due to not having a fully-functioning dashboard. Now that the dashboard is functioning, I should be able to start working on fixing these graph issues. Several people approached me to request the ability to link directly to a particular project. That way, users do not need to mess around with the select boxes. Above each table is a title. If you click on the title, the URL should update to link directly to the project. This is done with the 'distro' and 'project' query parameters. For example, a link to dex.html?distro=ubuntu&project=ancient-patches [1] will take you directly to Ubuntu's ancient-patches project. Attempting to specify an invalid distro or project will cause the query parameters to be ignored. While looking at the table title, you will also notice a new '(Graph)' link. This link will take you directly to the bottom of the page so you can view the graph. Currently, it is not possible to link directly to the graph anchor tag of a specific project. Attempting to do so will cause the '#graph' portion of the URL to be ignored. However, if you click on the actual graph, it will load a full-size graph.png that you can link to. One rather significant issue that has shown up is that the table is very wide. On most monitors, you will have to scroll horizontally to view all of the columns. This is due to the fact that most of the cells are made up of text inputs (they don't have a background or border, but if you click on some text in the table, you should see the box) rather than plain text. The 'size' parameter for a text input was meant to specify how many characters should be visible. However, while I have the 'size' parameter set correctly for each input, it is showing up much wider than the text. I will continue to play around with this, since excluding the size parameter results in some values getting cut-off. As mentioned in my last report, I have continued to work with Allison Randal to make the dashboard more useful. I have received feedback directly from her and indirectly from other people working on the python2.7 project. During my last phone call with my mentor, Stefano Zacchiroli, we agreed that it would be very helpful to spend some time documenting how to go about adding a new project to the dashboard and how to utilize all of the dashboard's features. The goal of this is to not require people to go through me or any other individual to be able to use the dashboard. So while the Summer of Code is meant to focus on programming, I will probably spend some time adding some documentation, as a program is rather useless if nobody knows how to use it. Another bug that I will be working on has to do with sorting the table. I had this feature working early on in the project. However, the sorting broke when I starting using text inputs instead of plain text. I have done some research, and I hope to get the sorting re-implemented in the near future. One other feature that has been requested by several people is the ability to hide completed tasks. This has been on my todo list for a while. Matt Zimmerman wanted to take this a step farther. He felt that the status of the task should be separate from the bug. This means that you can have an open task with a closed bug or a closed task with an open bug. The user could then have some more control over what data they are seeing. I will probably attempt to add some check boxes to control whether certain information is displayed. The user will also be able to specify this directly in the URL. This means that a team could link directly to all open tasks in a project. It is also worth noting that thanks to some help from the fantastic Alioth admins, I now have a live instance of the dashboard running on Alioth [2]. While the URL might change in the future, I hope to keep it running on Alioth. If you are interested in helping out with DEX or dextools, my code is available in a git repository on alioth [3]. You can also join the debian-derivatives mailing list, join #debian-derivatives on OFTC, or contact me directly via email or on IRC (nhandler). Thanks, Nathan Handler [1] http://dex.alioth.debian.org/gsoc2011/projects/dex.html?distro=ubuntu&project=ancient-patches [2] http://dex.alioth.debian.org/gsoc2011/projects/dex.html [3] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=dex/gsoc2011.git _______________________________________________ Soc-coordination mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination
