Week 4

What happened this week

The focus of week 4 was to implement and design the components of our Dashboard. With clearer requirements and a stable development environment we were able to accelerate our coding process. Our grown experience with angular helped us as well. Most of our time we spend on restructuring the data so it fits our tables and diagrams. Further we have go generate status icons which built up on different assets of data. We have also designed reusable components like charts, pagination and expandable tables which can be used on different sites.

In the weekly meeting with our project owner we showed our current status and gained feedback. The feedback for most of our components was very positive. Although it proofed that we have to adjust details in design and functionality.

Core issues

Some of the core issues this week was how to save the state of the page to enhance the user experience when reloading the page or sending a link to another employee. We implemented a way to save the current state in the url. Luckily, it is possible to change the url without reloading the whole page. So if somebody now searches for "foobar" on our page, this information is stored in the url. If he sends the url to another employee and the other one clicks on the link, he gets the exactly same view as the first employee.

It sounds pretty easy right now, but it was hard work to implement. There are a lot of different cases, like multiple search fields, table ordering, even tables within tables. To store this information up-to-date was really hard. Then we realized that we needed it more often so we had to build a service which is used by multiple sites. Then we had issues that this service somehow had shared states, which got us a lot of weird results. When we finally had pagination, ordering and searching for a table on a site, it was really complex to initialize those three services in the correct order so that the table finally looked correct because some services changed the state of others.

What happens in week 5?

The next week is going to be crucial for the success of our project. We have to build and finish the major components. The interval of our meetings will also be shorter as we are going to meet our project owners twice. Deadline for all coding on the dashboard is the 21. of October.

We made some snapshot from the test enviorment to give an overview how the Dashboard looks like.