Integrate the Big Brother Tree with the Dashboard

[jcassarly]

• Have a way to allow new big brothers to be added
  • may need to add this information to the brother model or just derive the information based on string matching with the big brother tree repo (will likely go with the latter)
  • this will need a UI interface that displays all the brothers / candidates that have not been assigned a big and have a dropdown to select the brothers from.
• Once the big/little relationships are added, the little's pledge class and their name will be added to the big brother tree graphviz file
  • will need to have access to that file from the server
  • from here we can then generate the new big brother tree
• A confirmation page will be displayed after generating the tree and if confirmed, this photo will be accessible from the database (not sure if i need a new model or something for this)
• I would also like to be able to have these changes automatically tracked in the big brother tree's version control.
  • ok this is a little bit jank, but what Im thinking is we clone the big brother tree repo on the server in the same home folder the dashboard is cloned in. From there we have access to all the text files we need to update the big brother tree and regenerate it (although I will need to install dot to be able to generate the png). Once these files are updated, I can run some system calls to create a new branch on the big brother tree repo (may need to make a github account for this), then this can be pushed up on that repo and we could probably also just do the merge to master on there al automatically. Notably, all of this only happens if the person updating the tree confirms the changes, otherwise, we don't commit any of the changes to git. If after confirmation changes need to be made, that would need to be manual since I would rather not have the dashboard erasing git history or adding reverts into the commit history on the big brother tree repo.

[jcassarly]

@kihashi @DLance96 thoughts on this? The last part is a bit jank, but I think it should work. Not sure if there's any issues with that that I am forgetting. I can make a service account and store the login information for that in environment variables.

[kihashi]

Would it be possible to have some sort of import mechanism for the DOT file? You could fill in missing data and flag discrepancies. The main issue I see is brothers who are not in the database since the DOT file contains data all the way back to the 60s.

I don't think the changes should be manually merged to the other repository- making a PR automatically seems fine, but I think it should be reviewed by a human. This is the ever-living history of the chapter after all.

From there we have access to all the text files we need to update the big brother tree and regenerate it (although I will need to install dot to be able to generate the png).

You may want to consider exporting an SVG for web use. It should be more performant. I don't think that was a feature of GraphViz back when I was handling things.

[jcassarly]

Would it be possible to have some sort of import mechanism for the DOT file? You could fill in missing data and flag discrepancies. The main issue I see is brothers who are not in the database since the DOT file contains data all the way back to the 60s.

I was planning on just writing a script to edit the DOT file and add the necessary fields to get the new people in. So I think we are on the same page here

I don't think the changes should be manually merged to the other repository- making a PR automatically seems fine, but I think it should be reviewed by a human. This is the ever-living history of the chapter after all.

That does in fact make sense. I'll need to install the github cli on the server I think to make the PRs then

From there we have access to all the text files we need to update the big brother tree and regenerate it (although I will need to install dot to be able to generate the png).

You may want to consider exporting an SVG for web use. It should be more performant. I don't think that was a feature of GraphViz back when I was handling things.

Makes sense, Ill use SVG rather than png. Ill probably end up messing around with figuring out which format shows up better. I do think dot allows us to export to PNGs, SVGs, PDFs, etc

[kihashi]

I was planning on just writing a script to edit the DOT file and add the necessary fields to get the new people in. So I think we are on the same page here

Ah. I was more meaning parsing the DOT file into the database (import) and generating a DOT file from the database (export). I think that editing the file will probably end up being rather brittle. How do you decide where to add lines?

Makes sense, Ill use SVG rather than png. Ill probably end up messing around with figuring out which format shows up better. I do think dot allows us to export to PNGs, SVGs, PDFs, etc

Yeah. We used to just do strictly PDFs, but SVGs are probably better optimized for the web and PDF is nice to send to the mailing list.

[jcassarly]

Ah. I was more meaning parsing the DOT file into the database (import) and generating a DOT file from the database (export). I think that editing the file will probably end up being rather brittle. How do you decide where to add lines?

When I've updated the file in the past, I've thought to myself that I could write a script to do this every time. Its pretty straightforward what you have to do. You add a new line after the last semester declaration and add all the names of the new guys. then you find the alphabetical spot in the big/little relationships and add that there (I can just read the whole file line by line and keep track of this information. I can probably even figure out how to do it without loading it all into RAM at once).

Maybe I'm wrong, but if I am I'll probably just take your advice and figure something out for importing to the database. Shouldn't be too hard to add all the brothers going back in time to the database. It's very scriptable to add baseline information. Maybe this would be the best way to do it, but I also feel like adding that much data isn't super helpful. If there's something else having all the alums in the database would help with, I would be more interested in trying to do this.

Yeah. We used to just do strictly PDFs, but SVGs are probably better optimized for the web and PDF is nice to send to the mailing list.

makes sense. I wasn't really sure how to display a PDF on the website anyways so I was gonna try and make an image. this part will probably require a bit of experimentation