Return from Break

Spring break was a very refreshing week. There was not much progress with our gauge application during the break. This was due to the face that we (me and my group mate paul) was assigned to work on getting the basics of the gadget running. This was a pretty simple task as both my partner and I worked on gadgets for the past 2 milestones. There is only one small problem with the gadget so far. There is an overlap in within the visualization.

At first I thought that this overlap may be a problem later on. But after talking with my partner, we figure that we will only be using one gauge at a time in each of the gadgets. So although we have two gauges shown in the gadget at the moment, we will cut it to one gauge.

New Group Project/Gadgets in review

After a couple months of working with Google gadgets, our group has moved away from the Google gadgets with visualizations and instead we are going to concentrate more on the visualization aspect. By focusing on the visualization aspect some of the coding should be a little bit easier. I am not 100% sure on what exactly we have to accomplish in this next portion of the course so I will write in more detail what we plan on working on in my next blog. So, since we are shifting our focus a little, I have decided to write a review some of what I have learned from the gadget projects.

In the Google gadgets projects, we had to pass a lot of information back and fourth and retrieve data from many different sources. While making the stoplight gadget and also making the wattdepot monitor gadget, we had to do two things to get the gadget working. We first had to get the visualization aspect of the code up and running, which is written in javascript. We then had to get the visualization code to run and work with the xml code that google gadget uses. So the gadget xml code retrieved the user inputted data, which then passes the information to the javascript where the visualization code runs. This visualization code retrieves the current api from the visualization website and draws up the information we need to get the visualization working. On top of that, both the stoplight and monitor gadget is looking at a data spreadsheet that is constantly changing. Having the code run through all these steps to get it running was a little of a pain. Luckily, while working on the project we never ran into a problem where something small that was out of our control went down. For example, we never had a problem with the visualization code not retrieving the library for the visualization. So by just having to work with the visualization portion of the code, I hope to sharpen my javascripting.

Overall, it was very fun working with the Gadgets and my group mates. I have learned a lot working on this project, especially about svg images and javascript. I enjoy coding and hope that the next half of the semester will just as fun.

Stoplight gadget 1.7

This week I am still working on the stoplight gadget. Hopefully, this will be the final touches on the stoplight gadget. The other two people in my group are working on the wattdepot monitor gadget. The modifications that we have made to the stoplight gadget this week are minor changes that will enhance the user experience while using the gadget.

The modifications are: for the gadget window to automatically adjust its height when the image size changes, the entire page does not refresh every time the reload time expires, and move the title of the gadget from the top of the gadget window to above the stoplight image. In our previous version (version 1.6), there is a lot of extra white space beneath the gadget when user would change the image size.

Luckily, this was very simple to fix since there is already a 'dynamic-height' feature in the google gadget api. So I only had to add a few lines of code.

The most tricky part of this weeks changes were getting the old values to change without changing the entire script. I originally thought that I would have had to add in some AJAX code to get the image, message, and units to all refresh without refreshing the entire page. I needed to find a way to trigger the event. Using the setTimeout() javascript function, I was able to get the images to reload without refreshing the entire page.

More stoplight modifications

After looking at our stoplight gadget again at our weekly meetings, we yet again found some bugs and fixes that we decided to make to our gadget. This time, we found that we mistakenly used parseInt() to parse our strings to numbers instead of parseFloat(). This was a simple fix and didn't take much time to fix. However, we also found that the way we handled retrieving the message from the message spreadsheets needed to be changed. Previously we had our message spreadsheets have the upper threshold, lower threshold, and message fields. Comparing the thresholds in this manner had a few problems that we decided to get rid of my changing the format of the spreadsheets. Our previous format looked like this:

The problem with having the spreadsheet in this manner allows for too much error. If the data source that the user is looking at has the value 20.5, the stoplight returned would be a blank one, since the value is between 20 and 21. So we decided to change the layout of the message spreadsheets to the following:The way the spreadsheet is now setup is pretty obvious after a small amount of explanation. The message would be 'low' if the value received from the data source is less than or equal to 10. The message would be 'medium' if the value received from the data source is less than or equal to 61. The message would be 'high' if the value received from the data source is less than or equal to 90. Finally, the message would be ' very high' if the value received from the data source is greater than 90. Having the spreadsheet formatted in this way removed the error that was previously discussed. This change, along with the parsing problem was fixed and is now implemented in the most current release of our stoplight project, version 1.6.

The stoplight gadget and any information about it can be found here.