csc322-grinnell / funding-resources

App for Grinnell students to find funding

README

Welcome to the campus funding resources project. Visit the site at https://funding-resources.herokuapp.com. Please note that this setup guide assumes you are using an Ubuntu server on AWS Cloud9.

Common Commands

Every time you add a new gem (this is similar to a library in C) you will need to run bundle install.

To update the data table, run rails generate migration [migration name]. Then, update the generated migration file to include instructions for how to modify the database. Run rails db:migrate after that.

You can find the data we used for developement in db/seeds.rb. If you want to re-populate the data, run rake db:reset.

To log in as an administrator (access active admin by adding "/admin" to the end of the base url), use the following:

username: [email protected]
password: password 

Initial Setup

Run sudo apt-get install libpq-dev. If prompted, update Yarn.

What's in the box

1. We've set up a User model for you to handle site users. It has an admin flag to denote users with elevated permissions.
2. Devise handles user authentication.
3. ActiveAdmin provides an admin interface that's easy to configure.
4. Webpacker integrates modern JavaScript packages. If you don't need it, the traditional Rails assets will continue to work.
5. Bootstrap provides a CSS framework for easy layouts and styling. It has fantastic documentation.
6. Sass adds some extra power to your stylesheets when they have the .scss extension. Regular CSS will always work great in them too!
7. Gutentag, our pride and joy, allows users to filter resources based on their tags (attributes).
8. pgsearch, a classic overachiever, lets you search the entire database without typing a single line of SQL.

Future Tasks and Goals

1. Define more tags for resources
2. Add a user sign up page with a way to verify that users have a .grinnell.edu email address. This is a great first task since the Hartl book has a step-by-step walkthrough for how to implement it.
3. Allow non-administrators to add resources
4. Create a map feature that allows users to find resource locations on campus (we suggest using arcGIS)

Verbose musings

This website is built to remedy the lack of transparency in funding at Grinnell. Currently, unless you know someone who knows about a fund, it is next to impossible to apply for, let alone receive money from, a funding source. In order to mitigate this issue, the CLS funding website provides a way for students to easily browse funds and find one that is right for them.

Our project is built around a table of funding resources. The schematics for this table can be found in db/schema.rb. The browse page of the website will display all of the resources. We use the “pgsearch” gem to look for exact matches between text entered into the search bar and items in our resources table. Users can also refine their search based on tags. Tags are extra descriptive features that can be added to a resource. Instead of having a true/false column for every potential aspect of a resource, we opted to use tags. This allowed us to have a sparse data set without adding in a ton of extra space.

When a user searches for something--this uses the get method--the index method in the search controller (app/models/search_controller.rb) is called. This first gathers a list (array) of all of the tags a user has selected. Then, it filters based on tags if they are present and/or a text search if it is present. If neither is present, it returns all of the information. Note that when you choose a new set of tags, the previous text search will be preserved and vice versa. However, entering in new text will get rid of the old typed search query just as selecting new tags clears the old ones.

Another very important gem is Gutentag! We use Gutentag to catalog each tag. Instead of assigning a tag array to each resource object, Gutentag creates a new tag object only when an entirely new tag is added. If a tag has been used to describe a resource before, it will use that same tag to describe every other resource that has that attribute. To implement this, Gutentag stores relations, which describe the connection between a tag and a resource object.

Finally, we use ActiveAdmin to allow people like Susan Sanning to add and edit resources. ActiveAdmin is called when “/admin” is added to the base website url. The gem allows us to create admin accounts and provides a graphical user interface for modifying the database. This is especially important for website administrators who do not have programming experience.

Our group did the bulk of our work while pair programming or in team meetings. Since none of us knew Ruby on Rails, it was helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Furthermore, it was much more likely that one of the two people working together knew something; the combined knowledge was enough to remedy a lot of bugs. It is also important to start working on the project as soon as you receive the code. While it makes sense to plan what you want to do, you will gain a much stronger understanding of what you can implement once you have messed around with the code.

Ruby on Rails is extremely difficult to learn. Ruby itself is fairly straightforward, but Rails is convoluted and foreign. It is just fine to be lost in the file system, confused about when to use plurals, and upset that the function definitions for one object are put in three or four different locations. Please remember that this language is a beast and that you unfortunately do not have enough time to fully grasp it (if you end up becoming a master Rails developer in seven weeks, please do not contact us to let us know).