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PRJ701 Journal Post 21

Week number

Week started

02/10/2020

Week ended

08/11/2020

Hours worked

This week, I moved away from any development work, apart from a couple of little fixes, and instead focused on writing the report for PRJ701s final hand.

This was a big job and I had to pour time into it and have several late nights before it reached a point that I was happy with. In the end it come to over 13,000 words and around 50 pages and while that probably isn’t the biggest report that I have written for NMIT, it would be right up there. I also had to get my blogs onto WordPress before the due date as I had been writing them in a word document up to that point as I had been finding WordPress very difficult to work with.

With those hand ins achieved the only item left is to create a poster to present at the BIT poster night, where I also hope to have a working version of the POS app on a tablet to show people.

As these blogs are marked from this point forward, this will be my final post for the PRJ701 blogs so I just wanted to add a brief reflection on the work placement and Project in general.

My work placement with Airsquare has been very successful and I was fortunate enough to be offered a 6-month contract with the company at the conclusion of the placement which I was more than happy to accept. This contract means that I will be able to finish my work on the POS app over the summer, which I am really looking forward to as I hate leaving things half done, before moving on to updating existing applications or potentially building new applications for Airsquare.

This is an incredible opportunity for me as it will give me a chance to build my skills and gain an industry reference as well as generating some income from my IT skills which is something that I have been working hard towards for the last 3 years. This can ultimately all be attributed to the Project as when I initially connected with Airsquare, two years ago and began intern work with them, it was with the understanding that I would be able to work with them on a Project in my third year.

Overall, I am very happy with the outcomes that I have achieved during project and during my B.I.T. studies in general and I hope that the end of this project marks the start of a long successful career in software development.

I would like to a final opportunity to wish my fellow B.I.T. students all the best for their transitions from study into employment and to offer a big thanks to NMIT and it’s IT tutors for all of the excellent tuition they have provided me with over the last 3 years.

PRJ701 Journal Post 20

Week number

Week started

26/10/202

Week ended

01/11/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Big tidy up of UI and Logic to prepare app for early release

Progress

Added validation logic to email inputs
Working on UI tidy up
Hardening all inputs
Added logic to item-edit modal for discounts, adjust quantity, etc
Added “remove” buttons and logic to customer, note and item modals.
Displayed discount in sell and checkout UI

Issues

No issues this week just want to have everything working correctly as Dave wants to release this early version to Compass Seminars for testing.

Comments

Last week of work place development as next week I will be focused on getting my report, blogs and poster up to scratch before submission.

I feel like there are many things I would have liked to get sorted in the app but I didn’t quite have time so it will have to wait until end of semester, Ill probably write myself some jobs 🙂

PRJ701 Journal Post 19

Week number

Week started

19/10/2020

Week ended

25/11/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Complete a sale through the checkout and order order confirmation process from start to end

Progress

Working on the Order Confirmation page UI
Working on the Order-Pending Confirmation page UI
Added animations to both pages
Added logic to both pages for validating email addresses
Added logic to both pages for emailing receipt
Added logic for starting a new sale

Issues

No major issues, just a bit under pressure with report due soon and still having a bit of development work to do in the application before I can use it for poster night.

Comments

Very happy to have the application basically done with a full process of adding to cart, checking out and confirmation working and while I feel a bit stressed, Dave is going to do a bunch of UI work to help push it over the line.

PRJ701 Journal Post 18

Week number

Week started

12/10/2020

Week ended

18/10/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Finish the checkout page UI and logic and start working on the confirmation pages

Progress

Added order confirmation page
Added pending order confirmation page
Working on the Checkout page logic
Working on the checkout pge UI
Removed any unused dependencies
Added an add order API
Added pending orders to database service

Issues

The work placement is just about to wind up so I feel some pressure to get as much done in this last week or two before I have to focus on my report work.

Comments

I definitely want to have the app looking complete and functional for the poster night so I’ll be trying to find a moment here and there to get things tided up.

PRJ701 Journal Post 17

Week number

Week started

05/10/2020

Week ended

11/10/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Finish tidying up and move onto the checkout page so that an order can be created.

Progress

Added logic for updatePerson API
Added tax-zone.service
Added more UI animations
General UI tidy up
Added checkout page
Working on the UI of the Checkout page

Issues

No major issues this week, work progressing well

Comments

As we start to move into the final stages of the user being able to select products and pay for them, it feels like we have nearly achieved a major milestone.

PRJ701 Journal Post 16

Week number

Week started

28/09/2020

Week ended

04/10/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Add animations to events in the UI like items being added to cart or a barcode pop up for success or fail.

Progress

Research ionic animations
Experiment with ionic animation
Implement ionic animation
Research CSS animations
Experiment with CSS animation
Implement CSS animation
Added tables to database.service.
Added person.service
Working on UI in customer assign modal
General tidying up and refactoring
Added Person-edit modal
Added person-add modal

Issues

The work with animations was very frustrating as there were issues with applying CSS animations to ionic components so some clever work arounds were needed with custom components

Comments

While the animations are little things, they definitely start to make the application look more polished and complete.

PRJ701 Journal Post 15

Week number

Week started

21/09/2020

Week ended

27/09/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Finish implementation of Dexie.js and push forward on getting UI and logic back on track.

Progress

Added logic to sub products modal
Added ion-ripple animation to tiles and buttons
Added sorting logic for cart
Refactored all services to use new database.service
Added more tables and interfaces into database.service

Issues

Feeling very behind after having lost a week or two with all the issues getting Dexie.js implemented behind. However, the overall feel of the application using the database and services is nice, and it seems to be performing well.

Comments

Very relived that Dexie.js is implementated and seems to be performing at an acceptable level after having had some performance issues initially.

PRJ701 Journal Post 14

Week number

Week started

14/09/2020

Week ended

20/09/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Get dexie.js implemented into the application and handling data asap.

Progress

Experimenting with Dexie.js
Added a database
Added data.service
Added tables to database
Added data to database
Got data from database
Implementing data.service

Issues

Very frustrating work at the moment, I had Dexie.js working in a few diffrent configurations but have only just found the one that will work for the application, all of the trial and error has been a time consuming process

Comments

More experimentation will be required with the database, such as how to use relationships with Dexie.js but at least it seems to be working with the rest of the application now.

PRJ701 Journal Post 13

Week number

Week started

07/09/2020

Week ended

13/09/2020

Hours worked

Goals

Serious issues encounted with the applications state managment, research and implement some new form of state managment, ideally using transactions.

Progress

Research on databases for local storage
Created a test branch and started to experiment with implementing dexie.js

Issues

A real set back this week with having to go back to the drawing board with the state management but at least it should be easy enough to implement if its is created as a service, then once its working, just swap local storage service for the new service.

Comments

Lots of pressure to get Dexie.js working asap as production is on hold until a solution is implemented for the state management, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a lot of clear documentation around implementation with Ionic.

PRJ701 Journal Post 12

Week number

Week started

31/08/2020

Week ended

06/09/2020

Hours worked

Goal

Restructure the application with multiple new services to handle most of the major data objects to reduce the size and complexity of application.

Progress

Renamed all services
Refactoring in cart.service
Added person.service
Added product service
Added event service
Implemented the new services
Research on offline warning system
Added skeleton text for loading events

Issues

No real issues this week, the restructuring of the services has been very time consuming but I can see how it will really improve the application.

Comments The new structure of the application using the new services is looking really good and makes a lot of sense to me in terms of reusing code and keeping data in sync. Definitely looking forward to being able to just call a service to handle all the logic of something.