CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've posted the skeleton for the preview manager: https://github.com/civicrm/prevem You should have permission to clone/modify that repository.

The README has instructions on downloading and starting. Let me know if they work.

The README also includes some examples of how I think you could interact with it. LoopBack automatically generates a whole bunch of APIs ("scaffolding"), and most of the examples are based on these. You can learn more about them by playing with the built-in API "Explorer" and by reading http://docs.strongloop.com/display/public/LB/Working+with+data

There are two operations which need to deviate from the scaffolding:

• When the Composer requests a new batch of previews, it gives a list of "renderers" to use. Based on this list, we have to create a series of separate "PreviewTasks" (one for each renderer). I followed the directions from http://docs.strongloop.com/display/public/LB/Operation+hooks and did this part. ( https://github.com/civicrm/prevem/blob/master/common/models/preview-batch.js )
• When a Renderer requests a task, we need to search for a task which (a) has a matching "renderer" and (b) is not already been worked on. Then (c) we need to reserve that task so that other Renderers won't work on it. This will require writing a custom method (eg "POST /api/PreviewTasks/claim"). There's some documentation about that at http://docs.strongloop.com/display/public/LB/Remote+methods , but this still needs to be done.
  

The skeleton has a few other issues which are less urgent. I've posted these to the issue queue -- https://github.com/civicrm/prevem/issues

The renderer can now claim a task and post the base64 encoded image back to the the particular task. Everything between the manager and the renderer seems to be working fine. I'll push the changes to github by tomorrow maybe after performing some final tests.
I'll just list down what all is happening rightnow:
1. Renderer polls the manager.
2a. If there is a pending task, it takes the screenshot, base64-encodes it and posts it to the "result" field of the task. Waits 10 seconds before polling the manager again. (Should I remove this wait?)
2b. If there are no pending tasks, it will wait 60 seconds before polling the manager again.

I also decoded the base64 string back to check if it was working properly and it was.
The expire time (Task_TTL) has been set to 5 minutes.
Now with this done, is there something else that needs to be done on the renderer side before we can move on to the composer side?

On a different note:
The code's getting bigger and it might be getting difficult to understand. I will need to take some time out to properly comment and indent it.
Also, in almost the entire code, I haven't placed error handlers. Especially the webdriverio part, because it keeps getting errors due to slow internet and the entire renderer process gets killed. I'll need to do that as well.
At what stage in the project do you think I should do this?

Just in case anyone comes back to look at this thread and wonders what's been going on... as we got into the final month of work, Utkarsh and I started doing more frequent status check-ins on IRC. There's been a lot of progress -- e.g. a big milestone was reached a couple weeks ago with a working roundtrip (with all the components talking to each other), but there's also been a lot of improvements on https://github.com/civicrm/prevem/issues

Anyway, keep an eye on the blog in the next few days. I think we'll be getting a proper report.

Hi xavier!
I've already created a PR and we're hoping to get it passed through the tests so we can start beta testing. Tim will tell you more about it. Maybe you can check the blog post I made about the project once. I'd love to hear the community's feedback. Here's the link:
https://civicrm.org/blogs/utkarshsharma/email-preview-cluster-gsoc-completion-blog