Infomed

Web portal that enables communication between hospitals and health authorities

Technical overview

This project contains a Python server built using Django. It contains an API layer that connects to a PostgresSQL database. The frontend is a single-page app built using React, and it's contained in the frontend directory. We use Bootstrap for layouts. We don't (yet?) need Redux, and we try to keep things simple there. No server-side rendering is currently considered, but it may be in the future.

Contributing

Read these first

• Platform overview
• Product requirements

Our workflow

1. Go to Our project board.
2. Pick an unassigned card from the "To do" column and assign it to yourself. If you want to work on something that is assigned to someone else, talk to that person (or @bl-nero) first.
3. As soon as you start working on an issue, move it to the "In progress" column. Don't assign yourself to tasks that are in progress, but also don't hold on to a task that you can't contribute to in a reasonable timeframe.
4. Request a code review. Don't merge code without it. Don't push code directly to master.
5. Run npm test to make sure you didn't break anything!
6. Merge to master!

Development (FRONTEND)

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.

Available Scripts

In the project directory (frontend/), you can run:

npm install

Downloads dependencies and allows you to build and develop the app.

npm start

Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits.
You will also see any lint errors in the console.

npm test

Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.
See the section about running tests for more information.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Your app is ready to be deployed!

See the section about deployment for more information.

npm run eject

Note: this is a one-way operation. Once you eject, you can’t go back!

If you aren’t satisfied with the build tool and configuration choices, you can eject at any time. This command will remove the single build dependency from your project.

Instead, it will copy all the configuration files and the transitive dependencies (webpack, Babel, ESLint, etc) right into your project so you have full control over them. All of the commands except eject will still work, but they will point to the copied scripts so you can tweak them. At this point you’re on your own.

You don’t have to ever use eject. The curated feature set is suitable for small and middle deployments, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to use this feature. However we understand that this tool wouldn’t be useful if you couldn’t customize it when you are ready for it.

Learn More

You can learn more in the Create React App documentation.

To learn React, check out the React documentation.

Development (BACKEND)

To get your development environment up and running, follow these steps:

1. Install python3 and pip3
2. Create a virtual environment for the project.
3. Activate the virtual environment.
4. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all the necessary dependencies.
5. Install Docker. These are the steps that I used: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-docker-on-ubuntu-20-04-lts-focal-fossa.
6. Run useful_scripts/install_dependencies.sh. This will require root access. If you have installed Docker, then this will also set up the Postgres Docker container, with the username and password user001 and 123456789 respectively.
7. Run useful_scripts/deploy.sh, which if you open the file, will run npm run dev which runs Webpack and Babel to generate a main.js in frontend/static/frontend/, which is what the Python server serves to the user. This can be done manually or by running this script. This script also copies the infomed/example.env into infomed/.env, which is sufficient, but SHOULD NOT BE USED WHEN DEPLOYED IN PRODUCTION. That file contains the database username, password, and secret keys which SHOULD BE CHANGED before we deploy. To do so, copy infomed/example.env into infomed/.env and modify manually the .env file.
8. After you have completed the previous steps, you can test subsequent iterations just by running python manage.py runserver.

API Documentation

The backend is structured as follows:

• The hospital database table is stored with the Hospital model in the hospitals application.
• This model currently has two fields: a name field and a location field.
• Calls to the API endpoint are routed through the views.py file.
• This is done by inheriting from the Django Rest Framework ModelViewset class, which has prewritten endpoints for HTTP GET, POST, PUT, etc. More information can be found here: [https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/viewsets/.]
• We also use DRF serializers to serialize our Python objects.
• Our serializers inherit from the ModelSerializer class in the DRF as well as the GeoFeatureModelSerializer class, an add-on to the rest framework.
• The GeoFeatureModelSerializer is used to serialize geometries.
• Finally, we use a DRF router to generate all our URLs in router.py. Finally, we can write unit tests to test our API in tests.py.