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Goal Tracker

A simple goal tracking app, inspired by 750 Words.

Process Notes

8/2/12

(at SEPoCoNi)

  • Created app: rails new goaltracker -T (-T leaves out Test::Unit - using Rspec instead)
  • Edited Gemfile to include Haml and the interactive debugger; ran bundle install to get them (and their dependencies)
  • Tried rails server and it didn't work because of gem issues - removed debugger and the server works. WHY IS THIS?
  • Came up with schema for Goal and DailyReport
  • Learned about generating models and migrations here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/migrations.html
  • Created Goal model
  • NEXT: figure out how to do one-to-many relationships and create DailyReport model

8/3

  • Learned about Active Record associations here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html
  • Created Report model, like this: "rails generate model Report report_date:date goal_met:boolean goal_id:integer"
  • Added "has_many :reports" to Goal class and "belongs_to :goal" to Report class
  • Ran rake db:migrate, which created the actual tables in the DB and the schema.rb file
  • Added "resources :reports" to routes.rb. (Not sure yet what to do with the "root :to => redirect(path)" line.)
  • Created git repo, but first went into .gitignore file and commented out the sqlite3 line, since I actually want to use it. (I HOPE THAT'S RIGHT?)
  • NEXT: Write some model code! (see SaaSclass textbook chapter 4.3)

8/4

Learning about model methods. Some stuff that might be useful:

  • Goal.create!(:goal_name => "be awesome", :times_per_week => 7) - this both creates and saves the object
    • create! - if anything goes wrong, an exception is raised - useful in the console
    • create - returns nil if something goes wrong - better in actual app code?
  • g = Goal.new(same args) - this should be followed by g.save!
  • Report.all - returns a collection of all Report objects
  • find:
    • Goal.find(3) - returns goal object with id 3; raises exception if key not found
    • Goal.find_by_id(3) - returns nil if not found
    • Report.find_by_report_date("2012-08-04") - returns a single object
    • find_all_by_attr returns an Enumerable
  • current_week = Report.where("report_date >= :this_sunday and report_date <= :this_saturday", :this_sunday => current_sunday(), :this_saturday => current_saturday() ) - returns an Enumerable

TODO: Create helper methods to determine the start date and end date of the current week. Maybe something like:

require 'date'
def current_sunday
	today = Date.today
	day_of_week = today.wday  # wday returns the day of week (0-6, Sunday is zero).
	sunday = today - day_of_week
end

Learned about working with dates here:

Looking at my model code. The "rails generate model" command gave me an attr_accessible line, not attr_accessor. Learned about attr_accessible here:

(In Rails, getters and setters are inherited from ActiveRecord, and attr_accessor is only used for attrs to be used in views/models but not saved to the DB.)

Created GoalsController index action and view - a mock-up of the goals summary page - and seeded the DB so it would have something to display. It works!

Started working on the logic to display the current week's data. I'm putting it in the Report model - not sure if that's the right place for it.

NEXT:

  • write current_saturday helper method in Report model
  • figure out how to get current week's data into index view
  • "show" action/view: single goal history page

8/5

Wrote current_saturday method.

  • It works in irb, but when I try to run it from the file in rails console, it raises NoMethodError.
  • Here's why: I was trying to call it as a class method, but wrote it as an instance method. Looked up the syntax for class methods and read this: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/05/11/class-and-instance-methods-in-ruby/
  • Added "self." in front of the method name. It works now. Got current week's data into index view.
  • Added a current_week method call to the view (Should probably figure out how to do it from the controller instead?)
  • Realized that current_week was returning entire Report objects, when what I actually want is just the goal_met values. Fixed that.

Created a very basic "show" action and view, and linked to it from the index view.

NEXT:

  • elaborate on show view
  • make "new" view

8/6

(at Collective Agency)

Don recommends fullcalendar.js: http://arshaw.com/fullcalendar/ (looks good, but may be overkill for this project?)

Created ReportsController, "new" action and view.

Learned about form helpers here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html

  • Generic or "barebones" helpers end with "_tag", e.g. form_tag, label_tag, text_field_tag
  • Model object helpers don't: form_for, label, text_field
  • To create a single form where the user submits reports for all their goals, it looks like I need to use form_tag, because form_for is only for a single instance.
  • Radio buttons are created thusly:
radio_button_tag(:nameofbuttonset, "value")
label_tag(:nameofbuttonset_value, "label text")

Learned about date pickers here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html#using-date-and-time-form-helpers

  • barebones helper: select_date
  • model object helper: date_select - use this if the date is a model attr to be saved to the DB

NEXT:

  • finish Report "new" view / "create" action
  • go back to "show" view.

8/7

(at jury duty)

Maybe I need to implement a User model to make this work? Since that's ultimately the parent model? Something like:

form_for :user do |f|
	f.fields_for :goal do |g_f|
		g_f.fields_for :report do |r_f|

More on radio buttons in nested forms:

8/8

(at the Lucky Lab)

Changed the radio_button_tag arguments like so: ("report[#{name}]", "true")

  • which generated this HTML: <input id="report_meditate_true" type="radio" value="true" name="report[meditate]">
  • and led to this error message: "ActiveModel::MassAssignmentSecurity::Error in ReportsController#create Can't mass-assign protected attributes: meditate, be in bed by 11, exercise"

Chuck says: if you need nested forms, it may be an indication that your data model needs rethinking. So, this:

  • User
  • Goal
    • name
    • state (active or archived)
  • Report
    • user_id
    • date
    • :build_statuses (class or instance method?)
  • Status
    • report_id
    • goal_id
    • status

Also learned about scaffolding:

  • Used "rails g scaffold status report_id:integer goal_id:integer state:string" to create a whole bunch of files:
    • DB migration
    • status model, routes, controller, views, helper
    • JS and CSS assets
  • Did rake db:migrate
  • Went into Gemfile and uncommented therubyracer; ran bundle to install it. (This embeds the V8 JS interpreter into Ruby.)
  • Quit and restarted the server, then went to http://localhost:3000/statuses to see the magic in action.
  • To get rid of the scaffold files: rails destroy scaffold status

NEXT: git commit and start anew.

8/10

(at Jeff's house)

Jeff recommends git flow, a plugin command line tool for git. Hotfix is its killer feature - allows you to fix a bug in one branch and apply it to all branches.

Jeff says: display code should not be in the model. You could put it in the controller, but that's not great either. This is a common failure of MVC. A couple other options:

In either case, you'd have, for example, a CalendarReport and a GraphReport wrapper or viewmodel.

Form view: instead of radio buttons, you could have a single button for each goal, linked to hidden radio buttons with JS. OR! Better yet, don't even have a separate report screen - submit reports from the summary view, using AJAX.

8/11

Poked around the scaffold files for a while, then removed them using "rails destroy scaffold status". Although the status-specific files and routes are gone, the code to create the statuses table is still in the schema, even after running rake db:migrate. (The scaffolds stylesheet is still there too.)

Created User model:

  • rails g model User user_name:string
  • added "has_many :goals" and "has_many :reports" to model Created Status model:
  • rails g model Status goal_id:integer status:boolean report_id:integer
  • added "belongs_to :goal" and "belongs_to :report"

Tried to run the migrations and they didn't work because the old statuses table still exists. Wrote a migration to drop it, then realized that wasn't going to work unless I deleted the previous migration. Did that, then realized what I should have done: rather than deleting the old status table, I could have just updated it by removing the state:string column and adding a status:boolean column. Duh.

Added state attr to Goal:

  • rails g migration AddStateToGoals state:boolean
  • added :state to list of attrs in model

Created new statuses table; updated Report model and table to reflect the new data model.

NEXT:

  • The code in the Report model no longer makes sense - rework or get rid of it.
  • Build some basic views, play around with fullcalendar.js?

8/12

Learned about git add options:

  • -A - all
  • . - new and modified
  • -u - modified and deleted

Added routes for users and statuses, and made root redirect to users.

Oops: forgot to add user_id to Goal yesterday. Created and ran the migration, and updated the model.

Created simple controller methods and views for User index and show.

Learned about validations and added some to the Goal model.

Realized I still don't know how to go about creating the Report form.

NEXT:

8/13

Learned about working with parent-child relationships:

Changed name of Goal "state" attr to "active" using this method:

def change
	rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column
end

Wrote build_statuses method in Report model. In the console, did this:

r=Report.new
 => #<Report id: nil, report_date: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil, user_id: nil> 
r.statuses
 => []

Realized build_statuses requires a user_id. So, tried this:

s=Report.new(:user_id => 5)
 => #<Report id: nil, report_date: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil, user_id: 5> 
s.statuses
 => []

So maybe before_create is only called when create (or save) is called? Yes: tried Report.create, and it called build_statuses. But: still got an empty statuses array.

Try calling build_statuses from ReportController "new" method instead?

In the User "show" view, can I pass a params[:id] arg to new_report_view?

Maybe look at these again:

8/14

Learned about nested resources here:

An experiment:

  • Changed my routes: nested reports in users.
  • In my User "show" view, changed "Submit a report" path to new_user_report_path(@user)
  • When I click "Submit a report", there's a user_id in the params, hooray!

So build_statuses is returning Goal objects, not Status objects. Fixed that.

Created new form. Getting the same security error as before. NEXT: Reproduce error and figure out how to fix it.

8/15

Searched for info on accepts_nested_attribute_for; read these:

Yesterday I tried using form_for @report but it didn't do the routing properly - reports_path no longer exists; it's now user_reports_path. Today it occurred to me that I maybe I could just specify the correct path, and indeed I can. Read about it here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2718059/nested-resources-in-namespace-form-for

So. I'm back to creating a nested form, even though the point of Chuck's data model suggestions - if I understood correctly - was to avoid having to deal with nested forms. So apparently I'm doing something wrong here? But I don't know what else to try, so I'm just going to proceed. FILDI.

Tried the form_for / fields_for approach but no statuses were created. Not sure why. Going back to yesterday's version of the form.

What's showing up in my params right now is this: "statuses"=>{"some goal"=>"true", "some other goal"=>"false", "do stuff"=>"true"}. What the Status model actually wants to see is "status" => "true", but then I'm back to the problem of having one big set of radio buttons instead of multiple yes/no pairs. There's gotta be a way to make this work, but at this point I'm inclined to give up on radio buttons and try something else. Namely checkboxes.

Maybe I need to use hidden_field_tag to pass the other params for statuses?

OK, the checkboxes form is successfully creating ONE complete status. The params[:statuses] hash only contains one set of status attrs.

TODO: look at these resources: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html#building-complex-forms

8/16

(at SEPoCoNi) Trying one more version of the form.

With help from Reid, I now have a form that creates multiple statuses. There are still problems, though:

  • An extra status object is created, with :status and :goal_id nil.
  • Report.user_id is nil

OK, fixed stuff. Here's what I learned:

  • In Report#build_statuses, I had a sort of convoluted way of getting at goals: User.find(:user_id).goals Here's a prettier way to say it: self.user.goals
  • In ReportsController#create, we tried several ways of assigning @report:
    • @report = Report.create!(params[:report]) - This led to a nil user_id, because although :user_id was present in params, it wasn't part of the :report hash.
    • @report = Report.create!(:report_date => params[:report], :user_id => params[:user_id]) - This took care of the user_id problem, but it led to the creation of only a single status per report.
    • @report = @user.reports.create(params[:report]) - This works, creating both the report and status objects.
  • Inside a form_for, you can access the current object by calling .object on the form builder

NEXT:

  • Create flash message to indicate successful create action
  • Build forms for creating new users and goals

8/18

(in the air) The view wrapper (views/layouts/application.html) is an erb file - I'm wondering if I should scrap it and create a haml file instead, just for consistency's sake? Seems to work fine as is, though.

Did the flash message thing:

  • Added a line to ReportsController#create: flash[:notice] = "Your report was submitted."
  • Modified the wrapper view to display a flash message if present
  • Discovered there was already a line in the scaffolds stylesheet to make #notice text green; added a line to make #warning text red.
  • Added a flash[:warning] line to the create method.

Created a partial goal_form and the "new" and "edit" forms that uses it.

Tried to fix UsersController#show so that it only shows active goals, but my syntax is broken.

QUESTION: What is the Ruby equivalent of try/catch?

8/19

Tried accessing the new goal form and got this message: "Unknown action: The action 'update' could not be found for GoalsController." Renamed the "create" method to "update", and it works. (Why is this? Is it because of the partial goal_form?)

However! When I try to create a new goal using the form, I get a validation error: active can't be blank. Which reminds me, I need to:

  • Figure out how to set default values for new objects
  • Handle other validation errors

Created new user form.

Figured out at least one of the problems with new goal creation. In the view I had this: form_tag new_goal_path, :method => :put do which I replaced with this: form_tag "/goals", :method => :post do

Updating goals is working now - still having trouble with creating.

8/21

(at Ruby Newbies)

In the User model, I added :goals_attributes to the attr_accessible line, and also accepts_nested_attributes_for :goals

I still wasn't getting :user_id passed to the new goal form, and I was going to try nesting the :goals resources inside :users like I did with :reports, but Don suggested adding an argument to new_goal_path in the User "show" view to pass the user_id value to the form. This works! I think nesting would have worked too, and I'm not sure which is a better solution. As is, the URL ends with "goals/new?user_id=7", whereas with nested resources it would be "users/7/goals/new", which feels a little cleaner to me (and could be made more meaningful to the user by replacing their id with their username).

Set a default value for :active by adding the following code to the Goal model:

after_initialize :set_active

def set_active
	self.active = true
end

8/22

Tried archiving a goal using the edit form, and it failed. Got the following error in the server output: "Could not determine content-length of response body. Set content-length of the response or set Response#chunked = true." I googled it, and based on the Stack Overflow conversation, it seems like this error is unrelated to the update failure.

Tried changing the times_per_week value and the goal name using the edit form, and both worked. So I'm wondering if there's something wrong with the edit form, which is where the :active checkbox lives (as opposed to the other attrs, which are on the partial form).

Googled "rails update failure" and read this: http://www.sofer.com/blog/updating-attributes-in-rails.html

Tried adding this to the update method in GoalsController:

elsif @goal.update_column(:active, params[:goal][:active])
	flash[:notice] = "Your goal was updated."
	redirect_to user_path(@goal.user)

This appeared to work in the browser, but I checked the value in the console, and it hadn't changed. And indeed, looking at the server output, I see the transaction was rolled back, even though all the required info is there in the params.

NEXT: either figure this out or go play with fullcalendar.js.

8/26

Decided to nest :goals inside :users resources; ran rake routes to verify that it did what I was expecting. Changed the relevant paths and controller methods but was getting weird behaviors:

  • user ids where goal ids should be and vice versa
  • one goal object had different times_per_week value depending on how I accessed it in the console: in the user.goals list, it had the original value; but when accessed via Goal.find, it had the updated value.

Wiped the database and created all new objects through the UI. Seems like things are working now. EXCEPT: updating goal.active still isn't working.

8/27

Looking at calendar options. I think I'll stick with my original approach to displaying the current week for each goal, and then have just one calendar with a user's entire history.

But first: authentication! How hard could it be? Watched this: http://railscasts.com/episodes/270-authentication-in-rails-3-1 and did this:

  • Reset the DB
  • Created and ran a migration to add columns to users: email:string, password_digest:string
  • Added code to the User model: a call to has_secure_password and a validation for its presence
  • Updated the User new view to include the new fields
  • Fired up the server to have the look at the new view and got this error: "bcrypt-ruby is not part of the bundle. Add it to Gemfile." It's needed for has_secure_password, and is already listed in Gemfile - I just had to uncomment it and run bundle.
  • Added some validations to the User model.
  • Created login form - sessions/new.html.haml
  • Created SessionsController
  • Added a current_user helper method to ApplicationController - I assume I'll need to change code elsewhere to make use of it?
  • Learned about the T-square operator (||=) here: https://blogs.oracle.com/prashant/entry/the_ruby_t_square_operator

A bit of reorganizing:

  • got rid of users index view - made the sign-in page the root view
  • got rid of goals show view, updated user show view so it doesn't link to nonexistent goal view

8/28

Tried moving current week display logic into UserController but couldn't figure out how to make that work. Putting it in the Goal model instead, so I can call a goal method from the view (even though I know that's bad practice).

Got it working, insofar as it can, but the whole thing needs rethinking. I need to keep the booleans associated with their dates.

TODO: rename Status.status to .goal_met?

QUESTIONS

  • How to install debugger without breaking the server?
  • What's the deal with not being able to update a goal's active value?

TODO

  • Figure out time zone stuff - looks like the default is GMT. Will want to use the user's local time instead.
  • Will want to prevent users from submitting more than one report per day - validate uniqueness on date, and deal with error handling.
  • If the user makes a mistake on a report, there should be a way to undo it - probably not by editing it, more like scrap it and start over.
  • The forms should probably have cancel buttons?
  • At some point I should probably get more specific in routes.rb so I'm only creating the routes I'm actually using?
  • Other goal trackers to check out:

DRY out controller code like this:

before_filter :get_object, :only => [:actions, :that, :need, :it]
def get_object
	@object = ObjectClass.find(params[:id])
end

NOTES FOR FUTURE VERSIONS

  • Will want to allow for inactive goals to remain in the user's history - deleting a goal should not remove the data already collected. (addressed this on 8/8 with Goal state attr)
  • Implement Jeff's suggestions from 8/10