Sneaky Southwest Checkins app task list

sneaky-sw.md

Sneaky Southwest CheckIns App

Target

https://sneaky-sw.herokuapp.com/

Tasks

• First, explore the target and ask questions about its features. For your own app, this would be the ideation/wireframing/scoping stage.

• Then, domain model — figure out the entire database structure: all tables and all columns. What associations are there? What foreign key columns and/or join tables? For each column, what validation rules, if any?

• Make an entity relationship diagram in firstdraft Ideas.

• Then, create a brand new Rails application. Click "Show Tutorial" at the bottom of your ERD for some help.

• Create the standard CRUD infrastructure for flights, and the standard sign-up/sign-in/sign-out infrastructure for users.

• If you want to, you can make things more attractive using Bootstrap and Font Awesome:

  • https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/components/card/#list-groups
  • https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/utilities/flex/
  • https://fontawesome.com/icons?d=gallery&m=free

  In order to get the Bootstrap and Font Awesome external stylesheets <link>ed to your HTML documents, there's a handy generator. From a command prompt,

  rails generate draft:layout
  

  This will replace your default app/views/layouts/application.html.erb file with one that contains <link>s to Bootstrap and Font Awesome. Before it does so, it will warn you that it is about to overwrite your existing one; if you wrote anything in there that you want to keep, go copy it and put it somewhere safe. Then say "yes" and allow the generator to overwrite.

• Nav:

  • Sign in/Sign up when no one is signed in
  • Edit profile/Sign out when someone is signed in

• Add a new flight form:

  • Get rid of user ID input; it should use the signed in user

• List of flights:

  • The signed in user should see only their own flights, not everyone's flights.

  • Make it an unordered list instead of a table.

  • Format the copy (don't worry about formatting the time yet):

    Departs for West Nickolestad at 8:22am on Nov 22, 2019

  • Format the time using the .strftime method. The method is called on any Time, Date, or DateTime object and requires a String argument that determines how to format the time. For example,

    photo.created_at.strftime("%a %b %Y")

    would produce something like "Fri Nov 2019". The time formatting codes are a pain to remember, so there are many handy tools to help compose them. I like this one: http://strftime.net/

  • Change "Show Details" link to a delete link.

  • Display "MESSAGE SENT" if message_sent is true before the copy, otherwise display "MESSAGE NOT SENT".

  • Break up the list into two lists: Upcoming flights and Past flights.

• After getting the interface for users to add and delete flights into reasonable shape, create a file in lib/tasks/ called send_reminders.rake. Within it, add this code:

  task({ :send_sms => :environment }) do
    p "Howdy!"
  end

  Then, at a command prompt, run the command rails send_sms. You should see `Howdy!"

  This is known as a custom rake task. These are nothing more than arbitrary Ruby programs that you can write and run whenever you want, but they are better than plain old .rb files because they are aware of your entire Rails application — most importantly, you have access to your models and gems. (Whenever you've been running rails dev:prime in the past, you've been running a rake task that I've written for you that pre-populates your tables.)

  Write some Ruby within the task that:

  • Finds flights where messages have not yet been sent. Print how many there are.

  • Finds flights that depart within the next 24 hours and 10 minutes. Print how many there are.

  • Finds flights where messages have not yet been sent AND depart within the next 24 hours and 10 minutes. Print how many there are.

  • Loop through all of the previous set of flights and print their description and departure time.

  • Finally, the last step would be to send the text message and then update sent_message to true.

    You can read the docs for the twilio-ruby gem here, but an abridged version follows:

    Find the Gemfile in the top-level folder of the app and add the line:

    # Gemfile
    
    gem "twilio-ruby"

    Then, at a command prompt,

    bundle install
    

    Now, anywhere in your application, you have access to the Twilio::REST::Client class, which will do all of the talking to Twilio's API for you. To send an SMS, for example, you can use the .api.account.messages.create method as follows (assuming you've stored the appropriate credentials in environment variables):

    twilio_sid = ENV.fetch("TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID")
    twilio_token = ENV.fetch("TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN")
    
    sms_parameters = {
      :from => ENV.fetch("TWILIO_ASSIGNED_PHONE_NUMBER"),
      :to => +19876543210,
      :body => "Craft your message here"
    }
    
    # Set up a client to talk to the Twilio REST API
    twilio_client = Twilio::REST::Client.new(twilio_sid, twilio_token)
    
    # Send your message through the client
    twilio_client.api.account.messages.create(sms_parameters)

  • You might have noticed that the times look off; this is because times are, by default, saved in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), or Greenwich Mean Time. I.e., 6 hours ahead of Chicago time.

    Properly dealing with timezones is tricky, although Rails does make it as painless as possible. For now, I recommend just assuming all of your users are in Chicago, if that's feasible for your app idea. If so, you can do the following. In config/application.rb, add the following lines somewhere:

    config.time_zone = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'
    config.active_record.default_timezone = :local

    This is not a great idea in real-world apps, because you should always store times in UTC in the database, and then transform them in the views to whatever timezone and format the user wants to see. But for our proof-of-concept, this hack will do.