Newcomer Problem/Solutions

This Wiki Page is setup to log all of the problems I have encountered/overcome as a new member of the Chandler Desktop team. The goal is to use this information to make the Chandler Learning Curve much easier and ultimately make a document that will sum up the problems and solutions.

Week 1 - 6/11/07

First Week on the Chandler Team. Still had all my accounts form last year, just had to remember logins and password. Spent week reading documentation and going to the giants game Also updated the Feeds Parcel Tutorial.

• Had some trouble getting onto KEI's TWIKI.
  • SOLUTION - Emailed twiki admin and got my email and password updated
• When running chandler from command line I was encountering a nasty Internal Chandler Error that told me to shut down chandler to preserve my data. This was a known bug.
  • SOLUTION: Added --catch=never flag and it worked

Week 2 - 6/18/07

Started working on my Contacts Project. Installed Wing IDE for use with debugging.

• Had problems running Chandler through WING - Kept giving me a GeneratorExit Exception and wouldn't run off a fresh checkout.
  • SOLUTION: To solve any problems with Weird Exceptions (GeneratorExit, AttributeError?) Just click the ignore this Exception location box.
    • These Exceptions are most likely not a problem and are handled but WING is confused by them. Ignoring that location will skip over them and let chandler run normally.
    • NOTE: These exceptions should only be skipped on the first run after a make install, otherwise you may be skipping over a real bug. If you are unsure about an Exception, look up in the stack and if there is a getAttr(self, attrName, None) somewhere then you can probably skip it.

Week 3 - 6/25/07

Continuing working on Contacts Project. Have it updated so that it is working with trunk chandler. Deletion is still not working properly, but it is not my bug.

Week 4 - 7/1/07

Working on the redesign of the contacts project. Sat down with Mimi, hashed out some problems and sent a message to the list.

• Just a thought that there is no documents for beginners. There seems to be a circular dependency problem in a lot of the documents. i.e. Document one describes A but not B, and document 2 describes B and C but not A. End up having to reread each document to fully understand it.

Week 5 - 7/8/07

Starting on the coding for Contacts.

• My TODO List is:
  • Play with the UI and make it prettier/more like the rest of chandler.
  • Make notes stamp-able into contacts and add an icon to the markup bar.
  • Add a contacts view to the Application bar.
  • Play with the quick entry box and see if I can get that working.
• Current Status:
  • Made UI a bit better
  • Trying to refactor Contacts code so that notes can be stamped to Contacts.
    • Am having circular dependency errors.

Week 6 - 7/15/07

Worked on implementing Contacts as stamps

• Still having Dependency errors, decided to just make it work in the trunk and then refactor the code into a plugin later

Week 7 - 7/22/07

Contacts are now working as stamps, Beginning to move them into a parcel. Now have demo-able code.

• Working on Circular Dependency Problems
• Need to fix import/export.

Week 8 - 7/29/07

Fixed Circular Dependency problems by adding a Blocks.py file

• Now having a problem dynamically adding to the Markup Bar from my parcel
  • Believe it is an issue of when the Menu is being loaded.
    • Working with pje and john to fix it
    • Looking into Entry Point Groups

Week 9 - 8/5/07

Intern presentations this week. Mostly working on that.

• Finished presentation, more work to fix UI problems

Week 10 - 8/12/07

Finishing up work on contacts parcel. Last full week here. Need to fix Import/Export and finishing making parcel installable.

• Importing now works, exporting still broken. Makes new file, but all vcard values are empty.
• Still working on UI problems

Week 11 - 8/19/07

Finished work on contacts parcel. Status can be seen at ContactProject. Cleaning up the code and writing documentation for the last few days. This is my last week at OSAF

• Documentation
• Code Cleanup

-- EdBindl - 20 Jun 2007