I’ve been on vacation, and then sick and then going on vacation again. There won’t be any updates from me until the 30th or so. I’ll be doing ragbrai and concentrating on eating pie and drinking beer for the next week or so. Until I leave I need to get some stuff finished up at work. Hopefully when I get back Chris will have some layout stuff ready for me and I can get to work on getting that implemented.
Not really, but it seems that way. Lately I’ve been researching the best way to get tabbed navigation in a rails app. I’m debating between a plug in and rolling my own sliding doors type solution…. and /or something more AJAXey.. Once I see what Chris has cooked up I’ll make my decision based on what fits that. Other than that I’m starting to think about getting the inventory management stuff going…
Going camping again this weekend and work has picked up so things are on hiatus until next week or so.
Today I did the re factoring I was talking about in the last posts. It went well, and more importantly quickly. What I have now works much better and got rid of quite a bit of complexity. Functionality wise I’m ready to stick out there for folks to play with. I’m going to talk to Chris first and see how much of the look and feel we can implement in a few days before I do, mostly to make a better first impression. There is still quite a bit of navigation clunkiness that I’d like to get rid of. Even with the navigation issues, I’ve got recipe creation working from end to end and a reasonable amount of ingredients seeded into the database.
Something may popup soon….
Chris and I met and had some discussions about a visual theme and layouts. We think we’ve got a target layout idea for v1. At the risk of articulating it incorrectly I’ll let Chris talk about it if he wants to comment (Chris if you want to blog stuff here yourself let me know and we can make that happen).
During the demo for Chris and playing with the site myself I have come to the realization that I have gotten the relationship wrong between ingredients and recipes. Currently we have the notion of an ingredient that says what it is, but nothing really specific beyond that. For example you would have a malt extract ingredient. There was another object called recipe ingredient that had more specific information about manufacture, extract percentages (60/40 wheat to malt or whatever) and quantity. Recipes and inventories were both constructed using the recipe ingredient object. After working with that I found it became a pain in the ass to build a recipe because you need to link it to a specific instance of a recipe ingredient. This meant you had to fill out manufacturer and all that for things in your recipe. This is wrong and just made things a bear. Its also what caused me to take so long to get recipe creation working (since it had a bunch of dependencies on inventory functionality).
I’ve decided to ditch that idea and just construct recipes with the base ingredients. So instead of saying Briess Malt Extract you just say Malt Extract as an ingredient in a recipe. This feels better and is how recipes are usually written. I’ve renamed the recipe ingredients class to be inventory ingredients.
A recipe will control how much of each ingredient it has and what not. There will still be an intermedary object that will encapsulate quanty and the ingredient, this will also be used in the inventory and proably be able to perform converesions (cups to oz etc)). This should reduce the coupling between recipes and inventories and save me a few headaches.