Udacity Conference Organizer README

An conference organizer app to help you schedule your conferences. Deployed on Google Cloud Platform using and implemented by Python mostly.

This is a README of Udacity Nanodegree Project 4. This file is response to project problems.

Environment

• OS: win7 x64
• python 2.7
• Google App Engine: SDK 1.9.32.

Setup Instructions

1. clone this project and replace some values with your own GAE app-id

   • 'application' of app.yaml -> your own GAE app-id
   • 'WEB_CLIENT_ID' of settings.py -> your client-id from developer_console.API_manager.Credentials
   • CLIENT_ID (line 89) of static/js/app.js -> your client-id from developer_console.API_manager.Credentials

2. run the app in Google App Engine GUI

3. deploy app

4. test the app in API Explorer

   • url: http://<your-app-id>.appspot.com/_ah/api/explorer
   • my deployment: http://http://nd-conf-org.appspot.com/_ah/api/explorer
   • I've prepared a brief test flow through Task_1 to Task_4, recording in TEST_PLAN.md

Task 1. Design Choice

• In order to reuse the existing code of conference app Model, I added model Speaker as child kind of Profile
  • Speaker entity is defined with name and websafe key
• Session is added as a child kind of Conference.
  • I use KeyProperty for indexing speakers in the session entity by storing speakers entity datastore key.
  • time-related properties, use DateProperty, TimeProperty, and IntegerProperty
  • Other property uses StringProperty
• sessionKeysOnWishlist is a property of user profile kind, where it's a list of sessions.
• five models update operation require transactional
  • update of conference
  • update of speaker
  • update of session
  • attending to a conference
  • add a session to wishlist

Task 3. Additional Queries and Query Problem

• indexes for querying are defined in index.yaml
• Two Additional Queries
  1. getConferenceSessionsByHighlight()
     • supporting user to query session with highlight string
  2. getConferenceSessionsByLocation()
     • supporting user to query session with location string
• Query Problem
  • Since the feature of datastore indexes, we cannot develop a query with two inequality filters on two different queries
  • We need to avoid second inequality filter

# solution 1: using list comprehension
ans = [session for session in sessions.fetch()
      if session.typeOfSession != "WORKSHOP"]

# solution 2: using IN-operator
ans = sessions.filter(
    Session.typeOfSession.IN(
    ["NOT_SPECIFIED", "LECTURE", "KEYNOTE", "CODELAB"])```

• since typeOfSession is not in fixed format, using solution 1 is better
  • this is implemented in queryProblem() in conference.py