codeforamerica / wexplorer

Wexplorer has been folded into the Pittsburgh Purchasing Suite and is no longer being maintained.

W:/Explorer

NOTE: Wexplorer has been deprecated in favor of the pittsburgh-purchasing-suite's Scout tool. This app now redirects to https://www.buildpgh.com

W-Drive Online

W:/Explorer (or just wexplorer) is Team Pittsburgh's digitization effort of a list of City of Pittsburgh contracts that started out as an Excel spreadsheet on the City's shared W-Drive.

Current Features

• Quick search of company names & contract descriptions
• Contract & company pages with more information about contracts/companies/contacts
• Ability to add lists of items purchased from these contracts

Planned & In Development Features

• Crowdsourced metadata about contracts

Quickstart

It is highly recommended that you use use virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper for convenience). For a how-to on getting set up, please consult this howto.

Then run the following commands to bootstrap your environment. You will need to make sure that you have a database to work with and that it is configured properly. If you don't include information about how to configure the database in your environment, wexplorer will look for a db named w_drive.

# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/bsmithgall/wexplorer
# change into the repo directory
cd wexplorer
# install python dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
# upgrade your database to the latest version
python manage.py db upgrade
# run the server
python manage.py server

NOTE: If this is the first time that you are working with wexplorer, be sure to run the following command (before starting your server) to stamp your database and allow for future migrations:

python manage.py db stamp head

Deployment

In your production environment, make sure the WEXPLORER_ENV environment variable is set to "prod".

Shell

To open the interactive shell, run ::

python manage.py shell

By default, you will have access to app, db, and the User model.

Running Tests

To run all tests, run ::

python manage.py test

Migrations

Whenever a database migration needs to be made. Run the following commmands: ::

python manage.py db migrate

This will generate a new migration script. Then run: ::

python manage.py db upgrade

To apply the migration.

For a full migration command reference, run python manage.py db --help.

wexplorer's Issues

Search bar size issues on mobile

Nav searchbar isn't consistent between the search results page and the contract and vendor pages

Have Search include Items that have been bought previously

Figure out way to update data

Right now the data for the app is stale (a bunch of new contracts have been added, updated, and removed). We need to figure out a plan to keep the app "fresh"

Add pagination for search results

Allow deletion or editing of purchased items

You should be able to delete items. Eventually, additions and deletions should be tied to accounts and only certain users should able to do these things (maybe OAuth because everything is on Google in Pittsburgh?)

Right now, though, you can just add items and there's no way to delete or edit them.

List of vendors + contracts used by a specific department

From Debra's feedback on 5/6: the goal of this feature would quickly show a list of contracts used by her department, I&P. When she's paying a stack of invoices, she prefers to see a list of vendors (like on her paper spreadsheet), instead of looking up vendors one at a time in Wex.

Ideas for implementing:

• Use departments already associated with contracts (and consequently, vendors) from Bill/Ed's spreadsheet
• Create lists from contracts your team is following

Format address in table

Put addresses into a table to improve readability

Build out an advanced search to search by additional fields

Making fields sortable

Add functionality to sort company and contract values alphabetically

Expand README with a bit of context

Add a short bit to the top of the README, introducing what the project is, who’s put it together, and that it’s a Flask app. Link here to help people get their environments set up:

https://github.com/codeforamerica/howto/blob/master/Python-Virtualenv.md

Add a new view with soon-to-expire contracts

Add line item data for current contracts

WARNING: HUGE TASK

Using crowdsourcing service (Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower, etc.), get all the contracting data into a machine readable format.

Add status endpoint for enginelight

People want this to be always up, so let's get it set up to add to enginelight.

Add "Last updated" text

Add last date the data was refreshed, so that a city purchaser knows how recent the info on the page is.

• in black in the footer perhaps?

Switch to a real build tool

While flask-webassets is ok, the less imports don't work as well as they could if we used a real JS build tool like grunt or gulp.