Have you ever tried to write a query using the Ed-Fi ODS for reporting or analytics? To say that it is challenging is to use the mildest language. The Data Standard documentation in Tech Docs is top notch. Nevertheless, going from diagrams and definitions to actual query code for, let’s say, each student’s average math grade during a grading period, is not a trivial exercise.
Originally posted on www.ed-fi.org
In 2014 I built a quick-and-dirty web application using ASP.NET MVC5 and AngularJS 1.0.2. There are probably millions of web applications, large and small, that are "stuck" on some older tech, often because people are afraid of the work it will take to modernize them. In this series of blog posts, I'll refactor away the tech debt and polish it up this little app to make it something to be proud of... as much as one can be proud of a simplistic proof-of-concept, anyway.
First up: basic and trivial cleanup of the solution, bringing it up to .NET 4.7.2. Future: improved testing; ASP.NET Core; Entity Framework Core and better separation of concerns; UI libraries / frameworks.
It is 2018, and I have only just learned about the fantastic FluentAssertions framework. Seems like a nice time for a quick review of unit testing tools for .NET. Personal preferences: NUnit, FluentAssertions, Moq.
There is a positive a trend of developers doing more of their own testing, going beyond unit testing. However, if independent testers are cut out of the loop, then surely many applications will suffer. Case in point: a user unexpectedly entering a decimal temperatures and military time in a citizen science data collection application.
The TERN data collection application supports the Texas Estuarine Research Network's citizen science efforts on the Gulf coast of Texas and has been in operation since 2016. The code and testing were 99% all on my own, in spare time on weekends. I had tried to recruit some help with this open source project, but other than a couple of early code commits, I was unsuccessful in that regard.
Packer is a cross-platform tool for scripting out virtual machine images. Put another way: use it to create new virtual machines with fully automated and repeatable installations. No clicking around. Some of the benefits:
I had just upgraded NuGet packages - a seemingly innocent thing to do.
Everything compiles fine and I tried to run my ASP.NET WebAPI service. Testing
in Postman works fine, but when I try to let the browser call an endpoint (any
endpoint), I get a mysterious 500 server error with a rather unhelpful payload
message of {"message":"An error has occurred."}. However, even with Chrome
accessing the service, a breakpoint in the endpoint showed me that the code was
executing fine. The problem is clearly occurring inside the ASP.NET engine when
trying to send the response back to the browser.
The API for FlightNode is essentially structured along the lines of the onion architecture concept. Follow that link for a full description of the concept. Because my graphics toolkit is currently limited, my diagram for FlightNode has boxes instead of concentric onion-looking circles...
This release candidate nearly wraps up the user management and volunteer work tracking functionality. There are a small few "should have" features that will be added in a future release. So what's new?
The .NET projects for FlightNode were created in several different Git repositories, thus giving us several small, well-contained, and re-usable projects. These small projects would be installed into the Service project as NuGet packages, which also makes for a faster compile in each discrete solution:
But… this has approach has caused problems.
The first beta release of FlightNode is now alive and in the hands of testers. So what's been delivered?
