12/2/18- 451 words

Since our last assignment, we were given our twist, which was to add a user login function. Kevin and I already had our hands full with the UI changes and the save/load functions respectively, so Chase has picked up that part. The save/load stuff that I was working on was a bit tricky. I had to use a module that I was unfamiliar with and that was not already in the project, called AsyncStorage, in order to persist the data. AsyncStorage wasn't the worst thing to implement, because it uses JSON as its encoding method, but figuring out whether or not the data was actually saving was hard. I had most of the code written before I could test it, and even then I had to put in some debugging statements and figure out how to access the console in order to get the save working. Load works, but the AsyncStorage module returns the stored data as a Promise object, not as a JSON encoded string, so actually using those values is difficult, and I couldn't figure out a solution. I believe that it has to do with the asynchronous nature of the library, but I'm not sure and I don't really have time to figure it out, since I have to integrate the barcode scanners too. I've worked on that a bit, and I've hit a few roadblocks with it, mostly with version issues. I had to individually install a few modules that npm install -all didn't get, and change a few dependencies in the app's files, and it still didn't build, so I had to throw out all those changes so I could test the vehicle lookup additional, which I also worked on today. I met up with one of the members of the Delta V database team that wrote the php files we needed for the new information, and we worked through the changes that needed to happen to our code in order to accept his. After about two to three hours of changing a few little things like variable names and fetch calls, we got it working as intended. After all the other problems I've had this weekend, it felt really, really good to finally have something work. I'm gonna spend the rest of the evening chugging away at the scanners and commenting the other pages I've worked on so that next semester's teams will have an easier time than we did. If by 9:00 I haven't made any progress on the scanners, I'll call it and just get to work on the maintenance assignment, and on our slides for the presentation on Wednesday.

Brady Spradlin
Delta V Innovations Mobile Team 1
Team 6