Category Archives: Mike

Mike 5.19.2010

Hey, I can connect to the blog again!

  • Added a warning screen for missing dashboards in slideshows when the owner deletes it
  • Added a red highlight color to dashboards that are missing in the create/edit slideshow screen
  • Added a run-once updateDatabase() method which adds the two new tables, runs at the initial startup of the webapp much like the log4j init, does nothing once tables exist
  • Rolled back my database the the dump Phil gave me and ran my “final” version as a test, updated the database and ran fine
  • After too much effort, committed everything* to svn using TortoiseSVN:
    • Visibility3 (Java)
    • ManagementUtils
    • EdgeUtils
    • Vis2

*I think I committed everything I changed but trying to commit in eclipse with subversive corrupted my svn files so we shall see

Mike 5.18.2010

  • It works! The load isn’t bad (couple seconds on my machine with local database for 3 small slides) and the slide transitions are instant.  I can also easily add animated transitions from this point.
  • Need to add a little more error handling and clean up some of the menus before checking it in.

Mike 5.17.2010

  • Finished up the slideshow create screen and some error checks for when a dashboard has been deleted but still exists in a slideshow
  • Started on the slideshow controls and a slideshow canvas.  The controls fit nicely by the logo near the top.  For running a slideshow, I’m planning on creating a new canvas atop the work area and covering all controls while the slideshow is running.  I’ll load all slides up front (we’ll see how well that works) and create a view stack.  This should allow for smooth transitions between slides and save window positions while flipping between slides.  I will disable the ability to close panels but they can still be moved (depending on the layout manager) and minimized/maximized.

Mike 5.13.2010

  • Thanks to Phil’s DB dump, I’m back up and running, making good progress on the Drag+Drop interface for configuring slideshows
  • Should finish the creation interface tomorrow then start work on actually loading / displaying the slideshows
  • Finally got ProjPortfolioMgrClient to build successfully

Mike 5.4.2010

  • Connected to new SVN, checked out and built everything after a little bit of work.  Haven’t tried committing anything yet.
  • Started working on slide shows:
    • Mapped out methods to save slide shows to database but haven’t decided on a table structure yet, probably going to add 2 new tables: one with all the slide show details similar to the dashboard table and a second containing several foreign keys (a slideshowID, dashboardID) and an int holding the order.  So there’d be one entry in the first table per slide show and an entry in the second table for every view in every slide show.
    • Started working on a slide show creation/edit screen.  It’s going to have a list of available views on the left which can be dragged to a list of included views on the right.  The order can then be changed by dragging as well.
    • Finally I’ve only started thinking about the slide show controls. It’s obviously going to need a next and previous button as well as some kind of timed auto next and probably a “jump to” drop-down since going from view to view will not be nearly as fast as say a powerpoint presentation.  It will also need to be compact and draggable (unless I put in in the empty space along the top near the logo).

Open to suggestions on any of this stuff.

Mike 4.18.10

Lots to post, checked in at least a week ago:

  • Reverted the changes to remove all dollar signs and commas from the data
  • Fixed the issues that the extra characters caused in the widgets

checked in today:

  • Created a new panel type called “ConfigurablePanel” which has a new button in the top right for configuring panel details.  A menu slides up from the bottom when it is clicked and slides away on the next click.
  • Started working on removing the hardcoded “name” column from TrendWidgets but ran in to problem after problem until the latest one: In AdvQueryWidget, when a user wishes to trend several rows of data, the AdvQW generates a query to give to the trend widget.  The query contains the specific rows the user selected by adding where clauses based on the ‘name’ column (the only column we used to think was unique).  Which is the problem I’m not sure how to solve…
  • Ended up creating a popup menu and asked the user to select the appropriate column based on a list of columns containing only unique values
  • Tested the new TrendWidget mechanism: saving, loading, and thresholds all seem to be working now
  • Created a status list similar to our old orb status display.  If a column called “status” exists, a TileList is added to the accordian and each item will be represented by an icon from the library: it tries to match the row’s status to an icon.  For example, if an item’s status is “normal” it displays the icon titled normal.  If a user uploads an icon called “purplemonkeydishwasher” and an row has the corresponding status, that icon will be displayed.  If no matching icon is found, a default file not found icon is displayed.  All text is displayed in a tooltip similar to the map tooltips.  I didn’t want to display a name under each icon since we have no knowledge of the column titles.
  • Added a set of 6 default icons much better than the previous weather icons.  They are: a green checkmark, red error “X”, blue help “?”, blue information “i”, yellow/orange warning “!”, and red forbidden “-“.  Sadly I found that flex cannot dynamically load SVG files (it can only embed them, wtf?) so I had to convert them to 64×64 PNGs which don’t scale as well.
  • Fixed bug in TrendWidget load method that was checking table permissions incorrectly and would never pass
  • The save and load panels are now moved to the top of the z-order when they are made visible instead of being half hidden by the query builder or other windows
  • Got rid of the annoying extra scroll bar that VisContainer was making on small resolution screens (1280 x 800), they may still appear on screens shorter than 800 high but hopefully we won’t have to worry about running on an iphone…

Next in the queue: SlideShows!

Mike 3.8.10

  • Added a Flex service for accessing uploaded icons
  • Added a simple TileList panel with a few buttons for uploading and managing icons
  • Few issues with caching sorted out
  • Programming on pain killers and muscle relaxants is hard*

*Do not copy in to monthly status report

Mike 2.12.10

Started work on a way to upload and manage custom map icons:

  • Created a new upload servlet similar to the file ingest one
  • This one also manages an index xml file which contains the filename and a title designated by the user
  • The index file will be required by the Flex component for loading the icon files

Mike 2.1.10

The following are done and checked in:

  • confirm a ‘name’ column exists before creating a trend widget, alert otherwise
  • numeric sort data columns in AdvQueryWidget if no string exists in the column (blanks are ok)
  • More informative callout pie chart labels, so informative there may not be enough room for them to appear (actually ‘WARLOCK DUKE (incl MRAP)’ is just too long to be sensibly displayed)
  • Data tables beside the charts now sorts correctly

For some reason, no matter how many times I uncheck it, I can’t not file this under Dong Shin