Hi there! Welcome to my first Sinatra App!
I’m excited to show you what I’ve built. This project didn’t take as long as the CLI-GEM project that I documented in February but it was a GREAT learning experience.
Background
I’m employed full time with a research/consulting/technology Company. In my day to day, I run a lot of reports for our clients and in my downtime, I like to think of new ways of doing things. Innovating is fun! I wanted to test out an idea that came to mind that would make life easier and not just for me, but for many departments. What you’re about to see is still infant and will remain a public, open sourced project. Since this project could potentially be presented to the stakeholders of my company, the next versions of it will become private due to sensitivity of the data involved.
Disclaimer
All data that was seeded into the Research Hub is fake. The companies and scores are also fake. =)
What is the Research Hub?
Well, Obama, the research hub aka hub is a web app that internal users from my company can use to create new products, reports, analyze data, and conduct research for white papers. It will serve multiple purposes for many departments. The hub is simply a reporting tool. It currently has fake, high-level data in it right now, but eventually in the private versions of it, it will contain true raw data. My ultimate goal is to work with our in house statisticians to expand on the reports and make it more dynamic in nature.
What’s the relationship model?
The models are:
- User
- Report
- CompanyReport
- Company
- Dimension
- Statement
- Score
The relationships are:
The Process
The process was hard! I had a hard time relating these models because I didn’t fully plan out the outcome. What I mean is, I failed to ask myself, “What do I want to see in these reports?”. Because of this, I blindly stepped in and associated the models without thinking ahead. This is a no-no.
It took me about 2 weeks before I realized, “I have to start over”. I didn’t mean from scratch, I was going to re-use a lot of the stuff I had already written, but it was the database tables and the activerecord associations that I had to really figure out. Once I start drawing out my models and how they relate to each other, I started seeing more of the report come to life. It’s much easier to start simple and then add on models as you see fit. The second time, only took me 4 days! =)
How do I use the Research Hub?
- Create an account – if you end up creating several accounts, I have code that denies your account if a username is already taken ?
- Navigate to the Research Hub – here you will see that your report hub is empty- so let’s create one!
- Navigate to the Create Report page
- Enter in a report name and report description
- Select at least one company and the other options (i.e., statements and dimensions) are optional.
- Click create
- And you just created your first report!
Until next time…
