Day Eighteen: RMH Homebase Continued

After wasting countless hours on a virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.04 and another virtual machine running Ubuntu 11.10, I finally got RMH Homebase to work on the 11.10 virtual machine. A fellow classmate of mine posted an install guide to his blog here. Although I followed very similar steps during my own installation attempts, his guide corrected whatever I was doing wrong.

The assignment for today is exercise 5.7 and 5.8 in the Software Development book.

Exercise 5.7: Debugging
As the book mentions, there are two places in RMH Homebase that display a shift's "notes" field for editing, calendar.php and calendarFam.php. Both of these modules include calendar.inc, so refactoring this "bad smell" should be as simple as adding a function to that file and replacing the old code with a function call. I added the following function to calendar.inc:


function predates($a, $b) {
return ($a->get_year()<$b->get_year() || ($a->get_year()==$b->get_year() && $a->get_day_of_year()<$b->get_day_of_year());
}

This function will return true if a's year is less than b's year or, in the case where both a and b are during the same year, a's day of the year is less than b's day of the year. In other words, this function returns true if a predates b. Unfortunately, the test file"testCalendar.php" is not present in my tests folder. I will have to hold off on unit testing until I can find a copy of this file or make a file of my own.

Exercise 5.8: Examining the Code
A. Sub Call Lists (SCLs) are viewed and edited through functions included in the module subCallList.php. In editShift.php, either "View Sub Call List" or"Generate Sub Call List" is displayed depending on whether the shift has an associated SCL or not. Here is the code:


if(!$shift->has_sub_call_list() || !(select_dbSCL($shift->get_id()) instanceof SCL)) {
echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"_submit_generate_scl\" value=\"1\"><br>
<input type=\"submit\" value=\"Generate Sub Call List\" name=\"submit\"style=\"width: 250px\">";
}
else {
echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"_submit_view_scl\" value=\"1\"><br>
<input type=\"submit\" value=\"View Sub Call List\" name=\"submit\" style=\"width: 250px\">";
}

As you can see from the if-else statement, not every shift has a sub call list.

B. Archived weeks are weeks that are set to the status "archived". The status can be set using the function set_status($s) to "unpublished," "published," or "archived." Calendar.php includes a statement that does not allow archived weeks to be edited by anyone. I cannot find any modules that call set_status($s). I only see if statements that check to see whether a week is archived in order to hide it from view.