e-mission / e-mission-phone

The frontend (phone) code for the e-mission server

e-mission phone app

This is the phone component of the e-mission system.

✨ This has been upgraded to the latest Android, iOS, cordova-lib, node and npm versions. This is ready to build out of the box.

The currently supported versions are in package.cordovabuild.json

Additional Documentation

Additional documentation has been moved to its own repository e-mission-docs. Specific e-mission-phone wikis can be found here: https://github.com/e-mission/e-mission-docs/tree/master/docs/e-mission-phone

Issues: Since this repository is part of a larger project, all issues are tracked in the central docs repository. If you have a question, as suggested by the open source guide, please file an issue instead of sending an email. Since issues are public, other contributors can try to answer the question and benefit from the answer.

Contents

1. Updating the UI only

2. End to End Testing

3. Updating the e-mission-* plugins or adding new plugins

4. Creating logos

5. Beta-testing debugging

6. Contributing

Updating the UI only

If you want to make only UI changes, (as opposed to modifying the existing plugins, adding new plugins, etc), you can use the new and improved (as of June 2018) e-mission dev app and install the most recent version from releases.

Installing (one-time)

Run the setup script

bash setup/setup_serve.sh

Activation (after install, and in every new shell)

source setup/activate_serve.sh

Running

1. Start the phonegap deployment server and note the URL(s) that the server is listening to.

   npm run serve
   ....
   [phonegap] listening on 10.0.0.14:3000
   [phonegap] listening on 192.168.162.1:3000
   [phonegap]
   [phonegap] ctrl-c to stop the server
   [phonegap]
   ....
   

2. Change the devapp connection URL and press "Connect"

   • If you are running the devapp in an emulator on the same machine as the devapp server, you may simply use localhost, which would be 127.0.0.1:3000 on iOS and 10.0.2.2:3000 on Android.
   • If you are running the devapp on a different device, you must type the address manually (e.g. 192.168.162.1:3000). Note that this is a local IP address; the devices must be on the same network

3. The app will now display the version of e-mission app that is in your local directory

4. The console logs will be displayed back in the server window (prefaced by [console])

5. Breakpoints can be added by connecting through the browser - Safari (enable develop menu): Develop -> Simulator -> index.html - Chrome: chrome://inspect -> Remote target (emulator)

Ta-da! 🎁 If you change any of the files in the www directory, the app will automatically be re-loaded without manually restarting either the server or the app 🎉

Note: You may need to scroll up, past all the warnings about Content Security Policy has been added to find the port that the server is listening to.

End to end testing

A lot of the visualizations that we display in the phone client come from the server. In order to do end to end testing, we need to run a local server and connect to it. Instructions for:

1. installing a local server,
2. running it,
3. loading it with test data, and
4. running analysis on it

are available in the e-mission-server README.

The dynamic config (see https://github.com/e-mission/nrel-openpath-deploy-configs) controls the server endpoint that the phone app will connect to. If you are running the app in an emulator on the same machine as your local server (i.e. they share a localhost), you can use one of the dev-emulator-* configs (these configs have no server specified so localhost is assumed).

If you wish to connect to a different server, create your own config file according to https://github.com/e-mission/nrel-openpath-deploy-configs and specify the server field accordingly. The deploy-configs repo has more information on this.

Updating the e-mission-* plugins or adding new plugins

Pre-requisites

• the version of xcode used by the CI

  • to install a particular version, use xcode-select
  • or this supposedly easier to use repo
  • NOTE: the basic xcode install on Catalina was messed up for me due to a prior installation of command line tools. These workarounds helped.

• git

• Java 17. Tested with OpenJDK 17 (Temurin) using Adoptium.

• android SDK; install manually or use setup script below. Note that you only need to run this once per computer.

  bash setup/prereq_android_sdk_install.sh
  

  Expected output

  Downloading the command line tools for mac
    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                   Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  100  114M  100  114M    0     0  8092k      0  0:00:14  0:00:14 --:--:-- 8491k
  Found downloaded file at /tmp/commandlinetools-mac-8092744_latest.zip
  Installing the command line tools
  Archive:  /tmp/commandlinetools-mac-8092744_latest.zip
  ...
  Downloading the android SDK. This will take a LONG time and will require you to agree to lots of licenses.
  Do you wish to continue? (Y/N)Y
  ...
  Accept? (y/N): Y
  ...
  [======                                 ] 17% Downloading x86_64-23_r33.zip... s
  

• if you are not on the most recent version of OSX, homebrew

  • this allows us to install the current version of cocoapods without running into ruby incompatibilities - e.g. CocoaPods/CocoaPods#11763

Important

Most of the recent issues encountered have been due to incompatible setup. We have now:

• locked down the dependencies,
• created setup and teardown scripts to setup self-contained environments with those dependencies, and
• CI enabled to validate that they continue work.

If you have setup failures, please compare the configuration in the passing CI builds with your configuration. That is almost certainly the source of the error.

Installing (one time only)

Run the setup script for the platform you want to build

bash setup/setup_android_native.sh

AND/OR

bash setup/setup_ios_native.sh

Activation (after install, and in every new shell)

source setup/activate_native.sh

Expected Output

Activating nvm
Using version <X version number>
Now using node <X version number> (npm <Y version>)
npm version = <Y version>
Adding cocoapods to the path
Verifying /Users/<username>/Library/Android/sk or /Users/<username>/Library/Android/sdk is set
Activating sdkman, and by default, gradle
Ensuring that we use the most recent version of the command line tools
Configuring the repo for building native code
Copied config.cordovabuild.xml -> config.xml and package.cordovabuild.json -> package.json

Enable HTTP support on android by editing config.xml

If connecting to a development server over http, make sure to turn on http support on android

    <edit-config file="app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml" mode="merge" target="/manifest/application">
        <application android:usesCleartextTraffic="true"/>
    </edit-config>

Building the app

We offer a set of build scripts to pick from, each of which: (i) bundle the JS with Webpack, and then (ii) proceed with a Cordova build. The common use cases will be:

• npm run build (to build for production on both Android and iOS platforms)
• npm run build-prod-android (to build for production on Android platform only)
• npm run build-prod-ios (to build for production on iOS platform only)

There are a variety of options because Webpack can bundle the JS in 'production' or 'dev' mode, and you can build Android or iOS or both. Find the full list of these scripts in package.cordovabuild.json

Expected output (Android build)

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 2m 48s
52 actionable tasks: 52 executed
Built the following apk(s):
/Users/<Username>/e-mission-phone/platforms/android/app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

Creating logos

If you are building your own version of the app, you must have your own logo to avoid app store conficts. Updating the logo is very simple using the ionic cordova resources command.

Note: You may have to install the cordova-res package for the command to work

Troubleshooting

• Make sure to use npx ionic and npx cordova. This is because the setup script installs all the modules locally in a self-contained environment using npm install and not npm install -g
• Check the CI to see whether there is a known issue
• Run the commands from the script one by one and see which fails
  • compare the failed command with the CI logs
• Another workaround is to delete the local environment and recreate it
  • javascript errors: rm -rf node_modules && npm install
  • native code compile errors: rm -rf plugins && rm -rf platforms && npx cordova prepare

Beta-testing debugging

If users run into problems, they have the ability to email logs to the maintainer. These logs are in the form of an sqlite3 database, so they have to be opened using sqlite3. Alternatively, you can export it to a csv with dates using the bin/csv_export_add_date.py script.

<download the log file>
$ mv ~/Downloads/loggerDB /tmp/logger.<issue>
$ pwd
.../e-mission-phone
$ python bin/csv_export_add_date.py /tmp/loggerDB.<issue>
$ less /tmp/loggerDB.<issue>.withdate.log

Contributing

Add the main repo as upstream

git remote add upstream https://github.com/e-mission/e-mission-phone.git

Create a new branch (IMPORTANT). Please do not submit pull requests from master

git checkout -b mybranch

Make changes to the branch and commit them

git commit

Push the changes to your local fork

git push origin mybranch

Generate a pull request from the UI

Address my review comments

Once I merge the pull request, pull the changes to your fork and delete the branch

git checkout master

git pull upstream master

git push origin master

git branch -d <branch>