Gauge Milestone Review

This week we made many small changes to our gauge gadget this week. There were no major problems that arose with the changes to I will just talk about the changes that we made this week and why and how we made these changes. Some changes we made were making the user input a wattdepot server url, we had to change the datatable that we receive from the wattdepot server to only show the units, added a timestamp and display the data type (power generated or consumed) below the gauge visualization in the gadget. The last problem (display the data type below the gauge visualization) is pretty self explanatory so I will not talk about it.

In our last gauge, we did not allow the user to input a specific URL to the wattdepot server but instead had the URL hard-coded. We did not know that there were many different URLs to different wattdepot servers so we took out the hard-coded URLs and added a user preference where a user can input the URL.

The second problem was that we decided to change the label within the gauge to just show the units of power generated or consumed. The following image shows our problem.

As the image shows, the label for the gauge is "Power Cons. (W)". The gauge retrieves the label from the first column of the data table. So to fix this problem we just used the setColumn() method in the dataTable class.

We also added a timestamp to the gadget where the timestamp will indicate the last refresh check. Adding this was pretty simple as we were just able to copy the code from our wattdepot monitor gadget.

After making the changes to our gauge the gauge currently looks like the following:


Something that I thought about for this gadget while writing this blog is to maybe have the url and sources be dynamically updated and be in a drop down format. Since the URLs are a little long and hard to memorize, having the URLs in a drop down menu will be much easier for the user. Also, since the certain wattdepot server URLs have specific sources that they are able to reference (ex. http://server.wattdepot.org:8188/gviz have sources kailua-house, saunders-floor-2) we could try to set the dropdown menus to display only sources associated with the selected server URL. So given the last example, if a user selects the server URL http://server.wattdepot.org:8188/gviz from the drop down menu, only the sources kailua-house and saunders-floor-2 will be in the sources drop down menu.I am not sure if this is possible but I will look into it have hopefully find a way to implement this idea in the coming weeks.

The gadget project can be found here.