In our third sprint, we ended up having to revisit some of our previous work and recreate it, but better. After having a lot of difficulty with the previous way of doing it, using some old code from an old project, I decided to go with a more structured approach and read the guide on making template driven forms on angular.io. This guide was incredibly helpful in creating the form, as it has step-by-step instructions, example code and is very descriptive in the how’s and why’s of doing things.
Using the guide and their code as a template, I began to customize the intake form to the necessary specifications. I pretty much tried to recreate the “Thea’s Food Pantry Intake Form” given to us by the food pantry representative. I had to make different types of input for the text and the button input, and this time I was able to get some error-handling working, such as required certain fields before submission. Instead of using WebStorm as my IDE this time, I developed everything on Stack Blitz, a free online IDE and Angular editor that displays your application in real time. It was really useful to use, and hopefully once our group figures out its intricacies and how we can use it to collaborate within it, we can use it more in the future.
I was able to use some of the lessons learned in my Software Process Management class to make sure I maintained the clearness and readability of my code as well. I tried to use good spacing and white-space in the form so that it is clear where one module of the code ends and another begins. I also tried to keep my names both clear and consistent, so that variables containing the same information are named the same throughout the program. This is an issue that caused me much confusion last semester when I was developing a different web based form.
A unique issue I ran into while making the form was the compiler getting confused about the format Student IDs at Worcester State University have. Because my ID number is “0662077” the compiler kept thinking I was trying to use an octal, which would be something like 0x662077, and would not compile. I had to accept the Student ID as a string instead of text to fix this issue. Another issue with accepting Student IDs is that the program tries to get rid of unnecessary 0’s, which ends up making my ID Number different from what is desired. It took me a while to solve this issue, as I had no idea what was going on at first, but it was interesting to see how it could misinterpret my input data because of a preceding 0.
Overall, this Sprint was relatively productive for me, and I hope to continue going forwards. I have to find out what my next goals and challenges are and figure out what I’m doing next. Hopefully it will be something I’m familiar with.
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