With all of the app’s basics in place, day four was pretty much just hard slog working on the nitty gritty. Slowly through the day pieces began to fall into place:
- The Backbone router was added and the application broken up into separate “pages” when the user clicks through the various entities to complete their questionnaire.
- The first drafts of the drag and drop controls were added, allowing users to place items on a grid corresponding to some sort of two- or three-dimensional rating.
- The offline/online synchronisation has been pretty much completed, allowing the user to visit the app, go offline, continue to work, and to synchronise in the background the next time they are online.
- Saving all the various answers to the different types of question to both the offline storage and the noSQL database.
- The “response” entity began to take shape, which will allow the user to open and alter previously saved questionnaire responses.
By this point in the week, we have quite a significant amount of CoffeeScript for all our models, collections, views and now the router, and the majority of it is in one script file, which all of us are working on. As you can imagine, this has causes a lot of headaches when it comes to source control and merging our changes. This would be the case with any source control system, but the distributed nature of Mercurial really hasn’t been a help to us. The process of committing, pulling, merging and pushing every time you want to get your changes to the rest of the team is overkill for our little project, Subversion would have been a simpler choice.
Looking onward to day 5, hopefully we’ll have time to enhance the app with some more of the ideas we were hoping to test out, but as we have been a man-down this week, we’re not going to manage all of them. We’ll be trying to tie up the loose ends in saving and opening responses, and adding some usability features to the app hopefully taking it from a test project to something more polished.