This sprint, unfortunately, was cleaved in twain by Father Winter. There were multiple white-out blizzards, which resulted in numerous missed class meetings. This proved to be a serious blow to productivity. In the face of nature’s obstacles, however, my group did manage to get more done than we would have anticipated had we known how little we would have been able to collaborate.

This sprint, we solidified much more of our understanding of PouchDB and the structure of our service. Due to the weather, much of our progress was done separately except for during a single impromptu meeting on Discord, so a gap in our respective grasps of the service has begun to form. However, in some capacity, each of us managed to learn and share with each other something new about PouchDB. As for me, I was concerned with the code itself. Much of my time in the first few days of the sprint was spent tinkering with the exercises we had completed during the previous sprint, in an effort to attain more than a working knowledge of PouchDB’s functionality. To this end, I redid the exercises from memory as best I could, but also framed the app in the context of Ampath’s patient data. The result was a rudimentary form of what the final service may look like – albeit without encryption, decryption, login, etc.

Of course, catastrophe managed to strike. As it happens, there are two versions of PouchDB: a JavaScript version, and a TypeScript version. We had been writing our code in the former, and wished to switch to the latter. In terms of syntax for the programs we’d written, this wasn’t all that major of a change, as we only really needed to change the import statement at the top of the file. Installation, however, was another issue. I spent hours with Fuve and Caleb one day, fighting with install errors that would pop up for one of us but not the other, until eventually Fuverion made some breakthrough that fixed everything. Admittedly, I still have no idea what he did, I’m just thankful that he did it.

Due to the inconsistent meeting times, coupled with the headaches brought about by switching to the TypeScript version of PouchDB, this was about as much as we were able to get done in this sprint. We have in fact discussed this already in an in-class retrospective, and have all agreed to make better use of our channels of communication: Slack, Discord, and a group text message thread between the five of us. In doing so, we hope that future unforeseen bouts of meteorological calamity will have far less power over our capacity for progress.

In this sprint, a very critical lesson was taught (or, perhaps a better word may be “reinforced”) to all of us: Do not assume that anything will go as planned. Do not assume that anything will be smooth, or easy. Because in the event that some blizzard comes along to remove two consecutive meeting periods, it’s far better to have modes of communication available for use and at the ready. In future sprints, I will work to ensure that my communication with my team is upheld in the times where I am, or any of them is, unable to be present.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Studio H by Connor V. and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CS@Worcester – BenLag's Blog by benlagblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Our team began work on the offline login service this sprint. We decided to first investigate AMPATH’s current login process, which turned out to be spread over many different components and services. We found where information was sent to the servers for authentication purposes and determined that what we needed to do was to point to an offline database instead of the servers. There would be no point in creating an offline login service from scratch, and in fact we needed to use their implementation if we wanted to meet the requirement of seamless transitions from online to offline and back. We created a mockup on Balsamiq of what we thought the finished login process should look like with both offline and online options. We would use the online tracker being refactored by another team to determine whether there was an internet connection, and send the user’s credentials to a server or an offline database for authentication based on the connection status. We began to think implementing this was dependent on having an offline database to work with, and we weren’t sure how to proceed before the team working on that piece completed their work.

We also learned about the bridge pattern this sprint, which we expect will be used to handle checking the online status for all the pieces of the app which will be able to function in two different modes. George posted some good resources on it to the team channel, which can be found below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1YQ7YRjttI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jIgSsIfh_8
https://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns/bridge

There were a couple of impediments to our progress this sprint. Multiple classes were canceled due to bad weather, and for this reason we weren’t able to collaborate as much or as effectively with the groups handling the encryption service or the offline database service as we had wanted. We did end up learning about some of the difficulties the offline database team ran into which apply to our service. They explained that patient data can’t be encrypted based on one doctor’s login information, because if it is, other doctors won’t be able to access it. They found a workaround, so going forward we’ll have a clearer idea of what’s meant to happen with the login information we send to the offline database.

The cancellations impacted our group’s ability to work together as a team as well. We do better when we can meet with each other in person and update each other on the progress we’ve been making in more detail than the stand-ups. Regardless, all team members answered the stand-ups in good detail and kept each other updated through the team channel, and I think overall our collaboration is getting better with each sprint.

One more impediment was that we discovered that we didn’t have access to server-side code to see what normally happens to the login information once it’s sent, which would inform our offline implementation if we had access to it. We plan ask the people at AMPATH whether that code can be shared with us in the near future. We also plan to make at least a mock of an offline database to use temporarily for our login service, and we might start using PouchDB ourselves if it’s not too involved. If nothing else, we will understand what the offline database team is doing better and be able to integrate our piece into the overall design more cleanly when the time comes.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Fun in Function by funinfunction and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Similar to the last sprint cycle, this sprint consisted mostly of research rather than actually writing code. Right at the beginning of this sprint cycle my team and I faced some issues regarding getting pouchDB installed in the ng2-amrs application. Not every team member ran into the same issue though. In fact, Ben was able to install PouchDB into the application first try without any complications. As for myself and my other team members, upon installing pouchdb using the command “npm install pouchdb @types/pouchdb” some of the other dependencies were erased causing the application to throw a bunch of errors when we were trying to start it. To fix this problem I reinstalled all the dependencies in the order listed in the Read-Me file. After that I was able to run the application without errors and ensure that pouchDB was still installed as a dependency.
After we got pouchDB successfully installed the next step was to figure out how to instantiate a pouchDB instance to store data locally. After a lot of trial and error I found that importing pouchdb into the app.component.ts file and writing code to make a new pouchdb database in the constructor allowed me to see the new database when I started the app. To see that the database was created, I had to open up the browser’s developer tools and go to application resources. After that I tried adding elements to the pouch database and getting them back. The nice thing about pouchDB is that the commands associated with pouchdb are pretty straightforward and it uses json objects by default. To add new elements to a pouchdb database named “db” you simply write “db.add(…)” with the element you want to add inside the parentheses. Then to retrieve that data element you can simply write “db.get(…)” with the element’s id inside the parentheses.
This sprint cycle also gave way to a whole new issue that my team will have to deal with in the upcoming sprint. In my last retrospective blog post I talked about pouchDB’s asynchronous capabilities with any server running couchBD. We learned this sprint cycle that the open-mrs server is not compatible with couchDB so we will be unable to apply pouchdb’s asynchronous functionality to this application. This may be a pretty big set back as we now have to develop our own service to ensure that data stays up to date between the open-mrs server and our in-browser pouchdb database.
Moving forward we will need to reach out to AMPATH and figure out how they want us to implement the offline storage component. Some of the things we will need to consult with them about are how the code should be structured, whether or not we need more than one pouchdb instance, and how we should synchronize the storage between the in-browser pouchdb database and the open-mrs server. As far as code structure goes, we need to figure out if where we instantiate the pouchdb instance is a safe place or not. I was thinking that we may want to write an offline storage module that handles all the imports and pouchdb logic and then import that module into the app.component.ts file. Next, we need to figure out if user credential information should be stored in a separate pouchdb database than the patient data to possibly provide better security. We will also be consulting with some of the other teams to try an figure this out. Finally, since we cant make use of pouchdb’s asynchronous functionality, we need to talk to the people at AMPATH to get some advice on how we should synchronize offline storage with their open-mrs server.
Another thing I did this sprint cycle is I started to put together an offline storage service that will be used to store patient records in our pouchDB database. The code I wrote for this can be found here: https://github.com/cpruitt1230/ng2-amrs/tree/master/src/app/offline-storage. I based some of this coded off of the advice given from one of the AMPATH developers on slack. Unfortunately I have not been able to test this code which should pull patient data from the open-mrs server and store that data in a pouchdbd database in the browser. Testing is going to be another issue that my team and I will have to address this sprint cycle as none of us are too familiar with how to write tests in angular not to mention tests that will ensure the in-browser database is storing what it’s supposed to. I’m looking forward to this next sprint as I feel like we are actually making some progress and hopefully we have a lot more to show for the end of next sprint now that we know how to get a pouchdb instance up and running.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Caleb's Computer Science Blog by calebscomputerscienceblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week marked the end of Sprint 3, and during this sprint I feel like thus far this was easily the most productive sprint. Although we did not spend too much time writing code, we did do a substantial amount of planning. I think that the planning that we’ve done will make producing our component that much easier and because of this I am looking forward the the following sprint that much more.

Although the majority of the following sprint was spent planning among our team and others, I still learned some things from it. Our team spent time trying to understand the way that they currently do authentication and what changes we’d need to make to be able to do it offline. Investigating the auth code forced us to go deep into the code. We started from the ui and followed the code until we found the REST call that is made to the server to authenticate. Having followed the code to this extent, the team and I now have a very clear understanding of how it works. This investigation has also revealed to us that we may need some access to their server code as to understand better exactly how the user authentication data is queried from their end.

Had we known from the beginning that we would’ve needed some access to their server code, we could have asked them from the beginning of the sprint and save some valuable time that was wasted searching for it.

As usual, the team worked very well together we did a great job breaking the tasks down and evenly spreading them out among team members. As for performance, we completed more tasks this sprint than previous sprints but the best thing that I think came from the sprint was the discussions that we had, every member of the group contributed their ideas and it really helped us see different potential solutions to some problems and pick out which one is best going forward. Individually I think I performed well, I contributed some useful ideas and helped the team come to some key design decisions. The previous sprint, time was a slight issue for me so I feel as if I did not do as much as I could’ve, but with the time that I did have I think that I used it very well. Going forward I think that we need to continue doing what we’ve been doing and build on the great sprint that we’ve just had.

The following sprint will involve a bit more documentation as we clearly layout our interface and make sure it coincides with that of the team doing the database component. Another big part of the next sprint will be communicating with AMPATH and asking them for the server code and asking for their thoughts on some of our current data designs, hopefully we can communicate quickly and get our answers so we can begin implementing because we intend to spend the majority of the following sprint  getting a large portion of the implementation complete.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by lphilippeau and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 3 has been very challenging due to the weather interruption of our meetings. In my opinion, this print has not been effective even though we individually learned or did something that was geared toward accomplishing our task for the sprint. In this regards, I think our goals for this sprint has not yet been met. For instance, we started sprint 3 planning by deciding on what service to work as a team. We chose the offline data capture service to work with. this service  was chosen with the mindset that the app is to collect data in the remote location where there is no internet access, so that when the user comes back to a network zone the data that has been gathered is either automatically synchronized with the main server or manually update the server to add up the new data.

Also, the team was again, assigned to work on refactoring the online tracker component of the app into a service that will include an indication as to whether the user is online or offline. This service will include an indication in the form of green light signaling the user is online or a red light for offline. This will basically tell the user whether he/she is connected to internet or has no internet connectivity.  Thanks to Jason, this aspect of the work has been completed and ready to push back for consideration. He has re-factored that part to work exactly as we wanted it to do.

In order to achieve this goal we then tasked ourselves to go research into offline data services that uses angular platform as the AMPATH app is an angular based app and study pouch db to acquire knowledge of  how to synchronize the data captured remotely to the local server. With regards, I spent quit amount of time studying tutorials on pouch db and couch db which I think will work well with synchronization of our work if properly implemented.

Again, Jason and Rick Phillips came up with the idea for implement the local storage which I think is working well with AMPATH app. We can remotely save data into it. We are now working on synchronizing the data into the server which I think this a part that pouch db come in to play. I am pretty much sure based on my little knowledge with the pouch db, it’s going to work out for us. I am confidence about that because in my exploration of the pouch db, I noticed that pouch db got doc count and update sequence. The update sequence tells you how many revisions have been made to the entire database and this is the thing that help synches all the databases together. It also has a function such db.changes which keeps pulls changes to the database.  And to do that, live have to be true. Live true tells it to keep pulling the changes to the database.

The only area I haven’t looked at and didn’t want to commit myself to saying something about it is the encryption part of the data. As the data captured needs to be encrypted for security as well as privacy policy, we are yet to figure out how to add that to our locally captured data.

Besides, per the recommendation by Jason, I had also learned a couple of angular tutorials which help in figuring out of what is going on in the app

Though it has been a rough print taken into consideration the snow storms that kept the team out of meetings, I believed the team kept up with the enthusiasm that it put into work in the previous sprints and we are on the way to having more work accomplished in our future sprints.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Exploration by ioplay and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.