Alfred Overhaul

[jobrachem]

What started with the implementation of a responsive design for alfred ended with an overhaul of the framework. The basic contents:

• New responsive design, including full rewrite of element.py with some new elements
  • Easily customizable via CSS (for whole experiments) and page attributes (for individual pages)
  • Consistent CSS targets for all elements for fine-tuned individual styling
  • Removed the "Element" suffix from element names for shorter, less redundant class names
• New object-oriented syntax for experiment creation based on class decorators
  • The former Experiment class becomes ExperimentSession
  • A new Experiment class is filled in the script.py
  • Pages, Sections, and InputElements are all now uniquely identified by their 'name' attribute
  • Lots of new convenience methods and attributes in the ExperimentSessionclass
  • The Experiment class, Sections, Pages, Elements, and sone utility functions are all directly exposed in __init__.py now, leading to a cleaner API (only one import alfred3 as al statement needed)
• Refactoring of the movement system, including
  • orderly saving of all data regarding participant's movements through an experiment
  • full rewrite of section.py with enhanced control over particpant movements
  • Re-organization of root section, leading to removal of page_controller.py
  • re-implementation of jumping between pages within an experiment
  • Possibility to define custom movement patterns for individual pages via hooks
• Refactoring of alfred's data handling, including
  • turning the previously nested structure of the .json data files into a flat structure
  • saving movement history and codebook alongside experiment data in a single .json file per experiment
  • automatic export of experiment data, movement history, and codebook to .csv at the end of each local experiment session