Prayash's GSoC Notes

Had a great journey this summer with Tryton. Really loved contributing to open source properly. Contributing these many days has made me happy. Happy for being able to give back to what I use. Thankful that I stumbled upon PyCon’s videos. Going through them is really fun. Hoping to contribute in python next time. :)

As for Tryton, Sergi and Cédric were always there with their quick responses on the IRC. Sergi’s replies sometimes made me smile instantly :D I wish I could understand the Spanish videos at the Tryton YouTube channel. I am planning to learn Spanish basics now xD After an entire day with code, human connection felt like a bliss.

Code Review #27421002 is where my work can be checked. This link will always have a special place in my heart.

Well yes, I recently made my (hopefully) final commit to the repo. With everything going as per the plan, I am really happy to strike out the items to be done in my workflowy list.

Last two weeks’ work enables one to select predefined exports to be navigated and selected from mouse and key presses. CSV is being properly generated for the selected records. Submitted a PR adding custom quote character support for PapaParse’s unparse method.

Well yes, according to my Trello board, I am just a couple of methods away from completely porting the Import/Export feature from Python (GTK) to JavaScript (sao). The journey now feels rewarding, especially since I just learnt that GNU Health uses Tryton as their framework too.

There has been no problem as such since last two weeks. Made the predefined exports be used, created, saved and removed. Can now get the records selected in the tab and could fetch the relevant data from the ‘export_data’ RPC call. Got confidence in making the RPC calls in general.

Feeling comfortable around promises. Now I smile at the times when the folks at my college club would use promise for every concurrency issue, and I would be staring at them poker-faced.

Mid-terms went well. Having completed CSV Import feature as per plan, I have moved to implement the second half of the project i.e. CSV Export feature. I was able to share most of the code with CSV Import and could quickly get the views for exports running. I found that more methods could be shared between the Window.Import and Window.Export classes. I am directly implementing them in sao. Have filed an issue for doing the same on tryton.

This is how the export dialog looks now:

I was finally able to use upload.py to submit the code to codereview. I was stuck due an uncommitted change. upload.py showed me:

Got error status from 'git show 016505c960eb7cdf2b2850a5f88fe3b5e79fc189'

Tried searching about this error, but ended up in links to the source code of upload.py itself 😆 Then I tried removing the index.html’s uncommitted changes with git checkout -- index.html and then upload.py worked! I use the tryton-sao.js file instead of the minified file so that live-reload works properly, it enables me to see changes without refreshing the entire page. From now on I use git stash to remove the changes before calling upload.py

It was quite exciting getting feedback on my code from mentors. I had missed some obvious things and made the necessary changes.

Another thing that I am trying to do is to switch to vim from sublime text. I want to replicate my existing workflow with vim. I am not quite there yet. I am unable to make custom keybindings work. Would write more on it, when I finally get it working.

Last two weeks have been great. I am finally enjoying both reading and writing code. I realise that most of the problems, I had when I was stuck could be solved after a taking a break and reading the code calmly. There were times, I just sat back opened two panes, one of the left and one on the right, and just read the code over and over again, till I got what I was doing wrong.

These two weeks I have been working on completing the views for the web client and made the action buttons functional. Keeping the code similar to GTK client. Discussed which CSV parsing library to use for sao. Ended up choosing PapaParse, and later I tried PapaParse to support custom quote character, which is a feature we support in the GTK Client. And the contribution was merged upstream :D

Did some refactoring, which I previously felt wasn’t necessary. Re-implemented some parts of the views in a better manner. And the best thing I learnt during all this, was using Chrome Dev Tools to map the source files so that I don’t have to Refresh followed by 9 clicks, every time I make some change, to just 3 Clicks! And am also using breakpoints to see the values floating around the function.

So this is the view I am trying to replicate on Sao.

As per the plan, this week's goals were to get familiar with the source code of Sao and Tryton in order to figure out how to make the views and plugin in the code for import/export functionality.

This would be the only way to understand how Sao works as there isn't much documentation on it. However, doc.tryton.org provides some basic insight into what are some of the things are e.g. Window and Form views.

I will be using http://github.com/prayashm/sao to get my work reviewed before submitting it to rietveld codereview.

About making the views, I read through the code for same in tryton client and added the corresponding elements into sao which uses bootstrap. I am a bit stuck at making the tree views work for the All Fields section and CSV Parameters section. Looking into it.

I spent the time fixing another easy issues. By now I am pretty confident about navigating through the codebase for fixing the bugs (grep -rl to the rescue!). As I have already posted, my project is about Porting the CSV Import/Export module from GTK Client (Tryton) to the Web Client (SAO). I am trying to make sense of problems faced by people when they post on mailing lists and mentors always there replying. Then again it feels good that real people whom I may have never known are using a project where I will be contributing.

I am accepted into Google Summer of Code 2016. Will be working on Tryton (under Python Software Foundation). I will be developing the CSV Import/Export feature for their Web Client codenamed SAO. I am very enthusiastic about this as I could finally write a proposal for GSoC after failing to do so for two years in a row.

Would be working mostly in JavaScript and the many tools that come with it. Would be working from home this summer. Really wanted to visit another city. Just waiting for the semester examinations to end.