IERI Utility

Finally after many, many, many months I am getting a chance again to work on the IERI utility. No doubt it needs a lot of work. I've got some great ideas about using CSS and Javascript to vastly improve the interface, javascript objects to enable a unified data entry system, and XML for client/server transfer. Perhaps I can even make this version more standards-compliant. This is going to require a lot of changes to the scripts and database. I've got some pretty good ideas of where to start. But this is going to easily be a six-month project. This is all still at the planning stage and things could change drastically.

Kathleen has a number of modification she would like to see added to the utility before anything else is done, so until I've made all those changes I'm going to have to stay in the planning phase. Most of the requested changes are bug fixes, but there are a few feature additions as well. Here's the list of changes I've made so far:

• Added teacher analyst user type with specified options. You can test this with username/password combo of teacher/p2061
• Made the idea boxes bigger in all areas, but the biggest change is on the activity detail screen
• I added a "Save Analysis Data" button to the left-side menu that is shown when an analyst is analyzing an activity.
• Fixed the bug so that you can now add an analyst after a movie has been checked in.
• Indicators that are "not observable" no longer have the rating/rating comment items attached to them. In the database these items are automatically marked as "not applicable" (I'm not sure if this is the preferred method or to just leave them as null.)
• When you duplicate an activity the relevant sighting information is also duplicated for that activity (along with it's connection to the literal information). I did have a question on this item (see below).
• Activities on the timecoding screen are now ordered first by their time-coding then below that by their activity number. So timecoded items will appear first in the order in which they appear on the video. The same is true of the sighting list on the enacted activity analysis screen.

Perhaps I should start maintaining a change log. It'd probably help when I get around to doing the code documentation. Based on how long it took me to do the documentation for the CCMS redesign I expect it will take me a good while to do the same for IERI. Especially when you consider that the majority of the system is code compared to CCMS. Plus I should make an effort to work on a user manual or online help system this time as well. It'll be nice to create a full-featured system compared to the work I normally have to do around here. Though it was a lot of effort, I found the extra work I did for CCMS to be gratifying.