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nightsprout / iom

IOM
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Urgent!!! Broken link #145

Closed partnersmap closed 8 years ago

partnersmap commented 8 years ago

I'm not sure why this one is showing up, but our partner at Evidence Action just spotted it.

Filtering by organization: Evidence action Click on either country (India or Kenya)

At the country level, the links to the indicators are dead. http://www.partnersmap.org/organizations/15?location_id=151

dtpowl commented 8 years ago

@partnersmap Looking into this.

dtpowl commented 8 years ago

@partnersmap Okay, should be fixed now.

partnersmap commented 8 years ago

Looks like it's merging the 2nd admin level when you click on them now

dtpowl commented 8 years ago

Oh, you're right. This is actually happening site-wide. I see what's going on; fix on the way.

partnersmap commented 8 years ago

Thanks for the quick response!

dtpowl commented 8 years ago

No problem! I think it's fixed now.

I feel like we have a situation here where there's a treadmill of bugs -- fixing one thing tends to break something else, and so on. The underlying cause of this, in my opinion, is that the system the software uses for retrieving data from the database, formatting it, and presenting to the browser to render as map pins is really idiosyncratic, complex, and error-prone. It means that changes in one place can have surprising effects somewhere else in the code.

I've worked on a lot of different Rails projects over the years, but the mapping stuff in this codebase is one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

If it were possible to totally rewrite that part of the software (and add automatic tests), I think it would make it a lot easier to avoid the "cascading series of bugs" situation in the future.

But rewriting it would be expensive and time-consuming, so it's probably not the right choice unless you're planning on major forward development. If you're ever planning on adding lots of new mapping features, or changing that functionality in a major way, I'd seriously recommend that we take the time to rewrite most of the existing code first. That would save us a lot of headache down the line and probably save you money in the long run.

Otherwise, it's probably better to just stay the course and fix issues as they crop up, as we've been doing.

partnersmap commented 8 years ago

haha yeah it seems like it's a mess in terms of the pathways... I don't imagine any other major features that we would be adding. Right now the majority of our focus has been to increase our partners utilization of the map. Hopefully, I can work with them to help identify different pathways that might have errors (like this one for example). Potentially, if the platform is heavily adopted, we could look at streamlining it.