Feeder Page

[JaydenBea]

7:30pm - ??:??

• Working on changing other pages' files locally to assuage issues from earlier pulls/pushes to Main
• Adding a table widget to feeder page. No backend for actually pulling data yet. Plan is to create some kind of function that takes in data and populates table with it, with dummy data for debugging.

[JaydenBea]

8:00pm - 8:15pm

• Created a Scaffold -> Row widget in feeder_page that holds the table and a placeholder for the sidebar
• Created a Container and BoxDecoration widgets for formatting

[JaydenBea]

7:30pm - 8:00pm

• Fixed a sizing issue with the sidebar
• Started making placeholder variables for dummy data to fill table with

[JaydenBea]

11:00pm - 11:30pm

• Added more dummy data.
• Added a method which builds the header row of the table.
• Added documentation to some methods, with the help of this guide.
• Began rewriting buildRow to take a map with certain keys; a 'date' which holds a DateTime of the row's date, and a 'data' map which holds multiple maps, each with data for a single entry.

TODO for later:

• Clicking on a cell on the table should bring up that entry's data in the sidebar, and allow editing of it. On the backend, this could be managed with an entry ID or maybe even object references?

[JaydenBea]

11:30pm - 12:00pm

• Successfully modified buildRow to use dummy data. Just prints the name attached to an entry for now. Can handle null names.
• Added dependency for DateFormat
• Looking into adding an on-click event for table cells so that they can trigger state changes in sidebar

[JaydenBea]

7:10pm - 7:50pm

• Added an on-press print functionality in an earlier commit
• Still trying to figure out a way of sharing functions/data between parent/child Widgets. Specifically, between FeederPage, FeederTable and FeederSidebar.
• Found promise in Controllers. They're classes that control the data of a widget. To connect between widgets, a parent passes it to a child as a parameter to its constructor.
• Rearranged FeederTable a bit to reduce clutter.
• Resources:
  • Create a Controller for a custom widget
  • Handle changes to a text field
  • What are controllers in Flutter?

[JaydenBea]

~12:00pm (start)

Fencepost

• Starting on writing a FeederController to hold state information for the Feeder Page. Of note:

  • When user is in selection mode, what entries are selected must be communicated between table + sidebar. Any added entries must then be displayed to table.
  • When user selects an assigned entry, sidebar needs detailed info.
  • Table must update when a user unassigns themselves
  • Same for any admin changes.

• Feeder page can be in three different modes: an empty view, entry selection, and entry view

• Empty view is 'default' view

  • Displays a short info bubble about what the user can do 'select an empty entry to... blah blah blah'

• User picks multiple entries to fill in entry selection

  • selected entries are highlighted on table
  • selected entries are listed with dates + stations on sidebar
  • 'Submit' button assigns user to all selected entries, and returns to empty view

• Entry view views an entry

  • Displays user assigned to entry
  • Notes
  • sightings checks for that station+day
  • Notes are editable if the user is viewing their own entry. they may also unassign themselves. Unassign button is not visible when viewing someone else's entry
  • Admins have heightened privileges (can edit anyone's notes, unassign anyone, etc.)
  • Sightings can always be ticked on but not off (save for admins). A confirmation button might help misclicks?

[JaydenBea]

12:30pm (since 12pm)

• Refreshed myself on the structure of Controllers + the widgets they interact with
• Created FeederController skeleton
• Added an enumeration for three different page states Todo:
• Instance variables for information required by each state
  • Ideally page would only hold info for current state at a time, but I can optimize that later.
• Methods for changing state + information
• Add Controller to Page, Table and Sidebar classes.

[JaydenBea]

1:00pm (since 12:30pm, end)

• Tested Controller functionality with the placeholder string in FeederSidebar. It works! When clicking a cell on the table, the string changes to the name displayed in the cell.
• Going to implement more features after a break.

[JaydenBea]

1:30pm (start)

• Continuing as earlier

[JaydenBea]

2:00pm (since 1:30pm)

• Created a wrapper class for the TableCell's contents that holds data in a variable. This will allow that data to be passed to the Sidebar on tap, which would then display in. In final, this data will likely be an entryID instead, and Sidebar and Table will have shared access to some table from the DB call.

[JaydenBea]

2:30pm (since 2:00pm, end)

• Moved all test data in FeederTable to a separate file for convenience + sharing between all files

• Added 'date' param to CellWrapper (as its outside 'data', which holds all other cell info)

• Added three placeholder methods in FeederSidebar for its three modes. build() will call one of these depending on controller.currentState.

• Did some research into nullable/non-nullable types in dart for a line

• Need to add a station param to CellWrapper (also outside, implied by data's position)

[JaydenBea]

5:40pm (start)

Continuing earlier stuff

[JaydenBea]

6:10pm (since 5:40pm, end)

• Added skeleton of the entry view's body, which references data in FeederController. Now I have to change FeederTable's CellWrapper's onTap to actually change the page's state, and send the data to FeederSidebar.

[JaydenBea]

9:30pm (start)

• Finished CellWrapper's onTap and Controller methods earlier during the meeting, untracked hours. Tapping on a cell in the table now displays its information in the sidebar.
• Added some padding to the cells in the table thanks to Anna's help.
• Daniel was finally able to get Flutter to connect to Firestore, but I can't quite use it yet until we get commits and whatnot sorted out

[JaydenBea]

10:00pm (since 9:30pm)

• Added padding and alignment via containers to various components of the Sidebar.

[JaydenBea]

10:30pm (since 10pm)

• Moved Container in buildCell to cellWrapper, to keep cell formatting in one place.
  • Side effect I only just noticed is that because date column doesn't use CellWrapper, it doesn't get padding. oops. will fix
• Added code in FeederController, FeederTable and FeederSidebar that implements selection mode. When an empty entry is clicked, it will move controller to selection mode and add the clicked entry to the Controller's list.

TODO

• Sidebar should display list of selected entries to user; specifically, date + station
• Cell selections should be toggleable. clicking a selected entry removes it from the list
• Highlights on selected cells
• Confirmation button on sidebar, which fills selected entries on click

[JaydenBea]

11:00pm (since 10:30pm)

• Added greater checks in FeederController to ensure controller is in a certain state, and that required variables are initialized, when certain methods are called
• Added code in FeederSidebar for displaying the user's selected entries.
• Started modifying CellWrapper to take a 'station' parameter, since selection mode must display this. Again, won't be required once DB is integrated into this code.

[JaydenBea]

~11:30pm (since 11pm, end)

• Finished adding station data to CellWrapper and buildRow. entry['station'] holds the station name and entry['cats'] holds a list of cats. This will also be needed for view mode, which doesn't show sightings yet.
• replaced addSelection with toggleSelection, which checks if the entry is in the list and toggles its presence.
• FeederSidebar responds to calls to toggleSelection. entries are added/removed successfully.

For next time:

• Add confirm button + functionality. FeederTable will need to listen to FeederController.
  • Find way, if possible, to specialize addListeners so that listeners don't call setState unless they have to.
• Potentially convert list of selected entries to a Table instead of a Row of Containers

[JaydenBea]

~4:30pm (start)

• Starting on converting the list of selected entries into a Table.

[JaydenBea]

5:00pm (since 4:30pm, end)

• Moved selected entries into a Table
• Added a header row with labels and formatting
• Created skeleton for button; no code on press yet.

TODO

• Add code for button
• Add better formatting
  • Button should be fixed to the bottom of the sidebar
  • Encase list of entries in a Widget that becomes a scrollable when there are enough entries.

[JaydenBea]

5:00pm (start)

• Familiarizing myself with database components Daniel has added
• Finding resources on how to properly interface Firestore with Flutter
  • Daniel found a video but I've yet to obtain it

[JaydenBea]

5:30pm (since 5pm)

Resources:

• Using Firestore as a backend to your Flutter app - Basics. Uses a StreamBuilder for live updates, and in-built transaction functions. The transactions especially will be useful to avoid data conflicts, but Daniel found a solution that uses in-built classes in Flutter to interface with data, so this would have to be modified to fit with that.
• Flutter Cloud Firestore Tutorial - CRUD
• Flutter and Firebase - Playlist Daniel was using. Will start filling myself in on these so I can flesh out the existing models for use with the Feeder page.

[JaydenBea]

6:00pm (since 5:30pm)

• Watched first video in playlist. It goes over the auth portion of Firebase, but I think I can leave that be for now (it's mostly to do with user sign-in)
• Watched part of second video. Goes over model set up. Right now we have two models, and they're both bare-bones (just to/fromJson functions)

[JaydenBea]

6:30pm (since 6pm)

• Finished second video. Started third

[JaydenBea]

7:00pm (since 6:30pm, end)

• Third video goes over Cloud Functions, which isn't relevant to what I'm doing, so I this video I linked earlier instead.
• It's much more relevant, going over how to use Flutter to add, delete and update data.
• Following this guide, I'll have to make functions in FirebaseHelper that interface with different collections. Such functions are then called from the models, and the actual UI part of flutter calls those functions upon the model class instances.

[JaydenBea]

9:00pm (start)

• I've looked over what's currently in the Entry class and I understand, now, some of the coding choices there
• Going to start adding methods to the class to update data

[JaydenBea]

9:30pm (since 9pm)

• Filled Station class with required parameters, + toJson and fromJson methods
• Added three collection reference variables to FirebaseHelper, as in the second video I referenced.
  • Uses string constants for collection names

[JaydenBea]

10pm (since 9:30pm)

• Added methods for getting Streams associated with the three collections
• Familiarized myself with StreamBuilder for clarification on how it's used
• Starting on adding documents for more entries into the Firestore database. Was doing so manually, am now gonna try and write something that will generate a bunch.

[JaydenBea]

10:30pm (since 10pm)

• Added methods to get streams for collections
• Started on replacing test_page.dart with something that would display every entry, but the way the Entry class is set up right now doesn't properly accommodate the reference types in Firestore. Working to resolve.

[JaydenBea]

11pm (since 10:30pm)

Successfully modified Entry's fields! Used a DocumentReference type for the reference type, and the Timestamp type for timestamp types. The latter is imported from the cloud firestore package, as in:

import 'package:cloud_firestore/cloud_firestore.dart';

With this addition, I removed the assignedUserCollection, assignedUserPID, stationCollection, and stationPID attributes from the class, as all of this information can be derived from the reference types.

• I made assignedUser nullable, to allow for empty entries.
• The TestScreen now prints a list of entries as expected. I'll now be adding a button and code that will generate some more entries that I can work with

[JaydenBea]

11:30pm (since 11pm)

• Added addEntry function to FirebaseHelper
• Added test code that generates an entries for a hardcoded date, one for each station.
  • Removed dummy stations added during debugging for this
  • Added sets of entries for April 6th and 7th
• Tried to make debugging list view scroll properly but it does not :(

[JaydenBea]

7:30pm (since 7pm, start post unlogged)

• Added a model for the 'users' collection named UserDoc. The name "User" isn't used because there's already a class in the firebase_auth package with the same name.
• Added variable to firebase_helper for a reference to the users collection
• Added getter methods to allow direct access to CollectionReferences.

[JaydenBea]

8pm (since 7:30pm, end)

• Polishing on the different functions available in the cloud firestore package
  • Structuring data
  • Adding/updating data
  • Transactions
  • Reading data

[JaydenBea]

12:10pm (start)

In class earlier:

• Added a getter for the FirebaseFirestore object in FirebaseHelper.
• Wrote code to add multiple entries
• Messed up and generated duplicate entries :(

Now:

• Fixed dupe entries :)
• Currently writing a method in FirebaseHelper that will ensure a set of entries exists for the current date. It will check for the existence of entries before adding any.

[JaydenBea]

12:40pm (since 12:10)

• Finished ensureEntries, which takes a DateTime object and ensures all entries exist for that date. If an entry for a particular station exists, it will leave it alone, otherwise it will generate a new entry for it.
• Going to start on modifying FeederTable's code to make DB calls and display all available entries. To account for weird errors, I'm going to make it display a row if and only if data is valid for that date (e.g., there's exactly one entry for that date for each station; no duplicates or missing entries).

[JaydenBea]

1:10pm (since 12:40)

• Added 'getEntries', which retrieves all entries for the given date. It calls ensureEntries.
• Added FirebaseHelper objects to feeder files
• Specified return types of getXStream methods of FH
• Starting on encasing FeederTable's build return in a StreamBuilder to facilitate data access.

[JaydenBea]

1:40pm (since 1:10pm, end)

• Imported collection.dart to make use of groupBy to group entries by date. Returns a Map<Timestamp, List<QueryDocumentSnapshot<Entry>>>.
• Started writing buildRows, which will verify data in each entry of said map, then generate a row if data is valid. Planning to sort said list of rows after adding process, since Map doesn't sort its entries, of course.

[JaydenBea]

4:40pm (start)

• Since last commit, started a newBuildRow function for building a row from data.
• Starting on converting the code in FeederTable to use DB data instead of test data.

[JaydenBea]

5:10pm (since 4:40pm)

• Changed code everywhere in FeederTable to use DB data
• Trying to wrangle an error where build is being called before FeederTable's list of stations can be initialized.
  • This StackOverflow question recommends a FutureBuilder.
• Introduced a separate error in test_page after specifying the DocumentReference type in Entry.

[JaydenBea]

5:40pm (since 5:10pm)

• Fixed the test_page error by removing the type specifications and using a cast on the line that initially prompted me to change the types:

DocumentReference<UserDoc>? userID = data.data().assignedUser as DocumentReference<UserDoc>?; ```

[JaydenBea]

6:20pm (since 5:10pm, end)

• Fixed the issue with stations not being initialized. Solution was to separate stations initialization code into a Future-type method, initStations, and encase the build return in a FutureBuilder. At the beginning of the FutureBuilder's body, a check is made for whether its snapshot has data; if not, a circular progress indicator is shown until it does.
• Fixed a separate issue where user data accessed inside of CellWrapper.build wouldn't come in the right format. It doesn't come in through a converter for some reason. Using UserDoc.fromJson alleviates the issue.

todo:

• Sort entries by date (currently comes in a random order thanks to being grouped)
  • Could turn mapping into a list of tuples (key, value), sort by key, and proceed
• Encase table in a scrollable so that other entries can be read (currently static).

[JaydenBea]

10:10pm (start) Earlier:

• Turned Table scrollable with a SingleChildScrollView
  • Ideally, header row would stick to top, but this is low priority.
• Sorted entries by converting them to a list, sorting them, and then putting them back in a Map.

Now

• Currently dealing with an issue where cells' text isn't changing when its corresponding entry has a user attached to it.

[JaydenBea]

10:30pm (since 10:10pm, end)

• Still dealing with aforementioned issue. I believe part of the problem might be threads. This is the offending code:

  DocumentReference? userID = data.data().assignedUser;
  _feederName = 'placeholder / null';
  int i = 0;
  if(userID != null){
    print('i before: $i');
    fh.usersRef.doc(userID.id).get().then((value) {
      UserDoc? userData = value.data();
      if (userData == null) {
        _feederName = 'ERROR';
      } else {
        print('first: ${userData.first}, last: ${userData.last}');
        _feederName = "${userData.first} ${userData.last}";
        print('changing i: $i');
      }
    },
    onError: (e) => print(e));
    print('aaa!');
     print('i now: $i');
  }

  Upon running, this is printed:

  i before: 0
  aaa!
  i now: 0
  first: Ada, last: Lovelace
  changing i: 0

Which indicates that the surrounding code body is running before the code in the then method is finishing. I'm going to try and modify CellWrapper to be a StatefulWidget with a FutureBuilder to force this code to run before the cell builds.

[JaydenBea]

At 3pm, over the last two hours:

• Moved code initializing certain data (list of entries, list of stations, User document references) to FeederDataSource.
  • Created the skeleton of a class that wraps some data relevant to an entry (snapshot of the entry itself, reference to its user data). Not used yet.

Todo:

• Add a method to FeederDataSource that will return the name of a station given its document ID, for use by FeederSidebar, which just prints the ID at present.
• Implement functionality to the sidebar that will assign the current user to selected empty entries on 'Confirm' button push.
  • Pre-reqs: change some of the current users in the database to have different names; at present there's a bunch of junk ones and the names of all of them are 'Ada Lovelace'.
• Allow editing of a selected, assigned entry's fields if the ID of said entry matches the current user.
  • Will require integration with the GSO stuff Marlon has added, and interaction with the FirebaseAuth class.
• Polish UI.

[JaydenBea]

7:50pm (start)

Earlier:

• Got station names to display correctly. This required moving the part of selectBody that created the Table selection into a separate asynchronous method, getSelectedEntryRows, which calls getStation of FeederDataSource to get the Station object referenced by an entry.
  • The check in the latter method that checks for DocumentReference equivalence turns the DocumentReferences into strings, since checking for equivalence the usual way doesn't work for some reason.
• Added code to CellWrapper that toggles cell color every time user selects or deselects an entry.
  • Currently does not reset properly if a user clicks on an assigned entry whilst selecting empty entries (CellWrappers aren't notified).

[JaydenBea]

Over last ~30 minutes, in last commit (18a377c):

Main stuff:

• Fixed toEmptyState() in FeederController so it transfers state to Empty and not Select
• Added a new DateFormat, formatAbbr, to FDS with " , " format. Replaced uses of formatDashes with this one. It's easier to read at a glance.
• Added a 'close' button to entry view mode that returns sidebar state to Empty.
• Fixed spacing issues with date column
• Added SUYellow to header of table

Minor stuff:

• Renamed format (DateFormat) to formatDashes and moved it to FeederDataSource.
  • feeder_test_data.dart is now redundant.
• Moved data printed by entry view mode to an array, so its stored in one place
• Added a function commonCellWrapping to FeederTable so the way cells are formatted is in one place. It takes an optional Color parameter for use by the header row and CellWrapper.
• Reduced padding on sidebar by a tiny bit

[JaydenBea]

Over last ~30 minutes, in last commit (e6dfff6):

• Added placeholder data in FirebaseHelper for the document ID of the user who is signed in
• Added a function to FeederController for use in select mode that updates selected entries to reference the signed-in user.
  • Changed FeederSidebar's select mode to call this function when the Confirm button is hit.
• Added CellWrapper as a listener to FeederController, so that it can become deselected when Select mode is exited.
• Page now exits select mode and goes to empty mode when the number of selected entries drops to zero.
• Entries on table successfully update when Confirm button is used, now.

[JaydenBea]

3pm (start) (I forgot to comment this whoops)

Next step is modifications to FeederSidebar's entry view mode UI:

• Make viewed cell a certain color
• Display entry's station
• Allow user to modify notes section for their own entries
• Add a 'remove' button so user can un-assign themselves
  • Should display some confirmation dialogue ("Are you sure"?) before confirming
• Polish UI in general

[JaydenBea]

3:30pm (since 3pm)

• Changed CellWrapper's fields regarding color to an enum for selection status, with variables.
  • CellSelectStatus enum has three instances: inactive (unselected cells), adding (empty cells being selected), and viewing (non-empty cells being viewed). Each has a color parameter that shows what color to display on cell.
  • CellWrappers now just have a CellSelectStatus field. Instead of having a color field, this field's color attribute is passed inside of build.
  • Cells will change state (and consequently, color) when tapped depending on the current FeederController PageState, and whether they have data.
• To avoid issues with CellWrapper's not updating, the user now cannot exit the view state unless they click the 'X' icon in the FeederSidebar. In the future I might be able to code the CellWrapper to nudge the user towards it if they attempt to click on the table while viewing an entry.
• Changed the list of items to display in FeederSidebar's view mode to a mapping for easier editing