schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Alan Elkner <aelkner@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Justas,

I wanted you to have a chance to check out the latest change I
committed to trunk on my demo server before we meet, so signing in as
manager, please check out http://69.164.203.135:36660/manage and
follow the link titled Skills Document.  I created a set of views that
do as Tom suggested, navigating a tree using the next layer down from
the current node as the name of the add links and tables of child
nodes.  The user thinks they are adding Courses and Competency Groups
when they are really adding nodes that have those layers.  When you
drill down to the bottom layer, it has an add link for adding a skill
to the one and only skillset for that node, and dynamically creates
the skillset if it needs to.

Basically, it does what Tom wanted for the user so that they don't
have to think about nodes.  It doesn't allow them to create weird
pathways of node parents or layer parents because it's focused in what
it does.  It does rely, at the moment, on finding the first layer that
doesn't have a parent and to decide that is the root layer.  That will
change with the Document object because we will have the user focus
the views even more by defining the layer hierarchy there.

As for changing the data model some, I have to agree with Tom that the
nodes and layers might as well live outside of the years, alongside
the skillsets and skills, and that we should add a document object and
container, also outside of the year.  The document drives the pathway
though the rest of the objects, and we only need to have a way for the
user to assign a document to a year so that the app knows what set of
nodes to serve up to the user when they are assigning skillsets to
courses and sections in that year.

Anyway, we'll be discussing this at the meeting.  Just wanted to give
you the heads up,
Alan