Continuing with tickets.

Today, I followed the work that Iadir started in the tickets section. The main advance that I made was keep doing the translation from the Event code to the Ticket code. We can do this because in general both sections have the same functionality. That is why I worked in the views archive from Tickets. I did not test it yet, so it is only a beta of the final idea. The changes can be seen in the modifyTickets method. It is pretty similar to the modifyEvent method.

After doing this, I started to make a research for the next steps. These steps will be developing the creation of the range of the tickets. The user should be able to determine a range, and the system should create tickets taking in consideration this range. To make this possible, I look at some functions in Django and how to handle arrays or lists.

I found some interesting links:

- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2322739/django-array-or-list-output (How to print or show arrays/lists).

- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/739942/how-to-pass-an-array-in-django-to-a-template-and-use-it-with-javascript (How to pass an array from Django to a template. This could be useful when using JavaScript).

- http://efreedom.com/Question/1-3636930/Data-Arrays-Django-Model (A question about using arrays, could be useful for doubts that could surge later).

Creating tickets

The next functionality that needs to be implemented is creating tickets for a certain event. Today I've been working on that functionality. It works like this: the user inserts both first and last ticket number, and tickets will be created automatically for that range. This is already functioning. Nevertheless, I have found that if an user sends a range that includes numbers of tickets already created, those tickets will lose their previous information. To solve this problem, I'm thinking on maybe warn users about that issue, and ask them if they would like to keep the old values, erase them, or insert a new range of ticket numbers.

2nd iteration (part 2)

As Renzo said (yes, he wrote the previous post) we splited up into two groups: one for the...say logic (which included the views, models, form classes) and another for the interface and graphic part (which involved using css, jquery, javascript and whatever that could improve the appearance of the system).

I'm on the logic team. We had a little hard time with forms. Actually we had never managed forms as classes before. Also we had trouble with some field properties (I never figured out why a PositiveIntegerField could possibly store a negative value!). For that we had to investigate about how to make extra validations to fields.

The whole "logic" for createEvent and modifyEvent is finished. I know that the interface team had an "uncomfortable" time trying to use jquery stuff in django. So, it's missing the big table where all the events had to appear. In a few hours we will ask for help to our professor.

This is getting quite challenging while we advance with the project. I say this because we are always thinking about new or improved functionality for the system, so it can be easy for the users to manipulate. I think we are doing great.

2nd iteration

The second iteration was about creating and modifying events. We had some problems here because at the beginning we didn’t have enough tools to do what we wanted. After some research we could find some commands that helped us to do what we had for this iteration in the story cards.

We designed the main page of the system; this took some time because we disagree on the first sketch. After solving the problem we split the job to work in a more quickly and efficient way. Some of us were working on the logic of the creating and modifying and other were working in the way of displaying the information.

We had one change from iteration number one, the database. The database in the first iteration was a problem because some of our group had some trouble accessing it. Each time that we wanted to access the database it asked for the password and when we introduced a valid password it refused it.  Fortunately we could resolve this by changing the database.

1st Iteration

This first week was a little hectic, specially because we had to setup everything to finally start working on the project, we ran into some problems installing some things in Windows, but nothing out of the ordinary and everything ended up working out, the main problem came when trying to install mysqldb on a machine running MacOsX, we couldn't even build the package whilst using Python 2.5, so we tried with Python 2.6, but we were unable to import the .egg to python properly

Thats when we decided to develop the entire project using Windows, besides this way we wouldn't have to change some paths (like the templates path in settings.py) when changing from a Unix based machine to a Windows one, we also installed tortoise so we could simplify the use of subversion thus making us use it more.

After everything was set up we started creating the register and login instances, this ended up being quite straight forward by using django forms (even the validation was already made for us), we tried to customize this a little bit, but realized that it might take some work so we decided to leave this non-essential details for later. We also used Jquery to personalize the final results, this first week had its up and downs, but we were able to do everything we had to and even more.