DKDiep / UP4-Conference-Central

Udacity Project 4: learning Google App Engine, Datastore, scalability

Conference Central

An App Engine application developed for users to create and register for conferences.

Table of contents

• [Design Choices](#Design Choices)
• [Software Requirements](#Software Requirements)
• Creators
• Copyright and license

Design Choices

The Session class is modelled similarly to the existing Conference class for consistency, with the required properties from specification and the session name being a requirement. It is designed to be simple and more lenient to match the abstract nature of Conference Central. The SessionForm class includes all properties of the Session class to prevent data loss, when creating a session the form is passed alongside with a websafeConferenceKey in the request container to define the new session and associate it with a conference ancestor.

Speakers of sessions are set as string properties. This was chosen over using profiles as the speakers themselves may not have registered on the app. The speaker field is also intended to be versatile, as there could be multiple speakers or corner cases that may lead to unusual input values (unidentifiable speaker or multiple aliases).

For names, highlights, and similar fields I chose to use StringProperty as it is most appropriate to contain descriptive texts that do not require direct numeric manipulation. For dates and times I chose to use the DateProperty and Time property respectively, although combining the two to use DateTime is also possible (it may also be useful to eliminate certain query restrictions). Although duration is semantically a time, I chose to use IntegerProperty to represent the number of minutes for simple comparison and ease of presenting the data.

Query Problem

"Let’s say that you don't like workshops and you don't like sessions after 7 pm. How would you handle a query for all non-workshop sessions before 7 pm? What is the problem for implementing this query? What ways to solve it did you think of?"

The issue with this problem is that you cannot use inequality filters for more than one property in a query. One way to overcome this would be to use a single indexed property and using inequality filters multiple times on that property to extract the value. This requires a specific model setup so instead I chose to filter one property (preferably the one that is less expensive) and then reduce it further manually. In my implementation I filtered sessions that start before 7pm and then manually removed workshops from the list.

Additional Queries

getProfileByEmail

This query checks whether a profile associated with the email address provided. It would be useful for users who are searching for other members they may know using email or an API service that automatically scans through an authed user's friendlist and retrieving emails to search.

getNextConference

This query uses the current time to establish the next conference to be held and returns that conference to the user. A user may be interested in the next conference to be held, and the query synergises well with the announcement feature where both indicate shortly upcoming events.

Software Requirements & API information

• Python 2.7.10

• Google App Engine

• Google Cloud Endpoints API

Setup Instructions

App Engine Deployment

1. Update the value of application in app.yaml to the app ID you have registered in the App Engine admin console and would like to use to host your instance of this sample.
2. Update the values at the top of settings.py to reflect the respective client IDs you have registered in the [Developer Console][4].
3. Update the value of CLIENT_ID in static/js/app.js to the Web client ID
4. (Optional) Mark the configuration files as unchanged as follows: $ git update-index --assume-unchanged app.yaml settings.py static/js/app.js
5. Run the app with the devserver using dev_appserver.py DIR, and ensure it's running by visiting your local server's address (by default [localhost:8080][5].)
6. (Optional) Generate your client library(ies) with [the endpoints tool][6].
7. Deploy your application.

API Explorer Testing

1. Access API explorer via '/apis-explorer' at end of URL
2. Select conference API service
3. Execute the endpoint methods with relevant fields

Creators

Dillon Keith Diep

Copyright and license

The code released was created for educational purposes, copyright and license subject to Udacity's provided source code - no other enforcements otherwise.