Feature Enhancement: Dynamic Select Form

[zshafiqu]

There was an issue where the search form made it difficult to get a report on cars where the name is ambiguous, or not well defined, such as ‘BMW 3-series’ or ‘Lexus ES’. One may assume they should enter BMW 325i or 'Lexus ES300'. The form being open to any text input also took away from the user experience because, what if someone is just exploring? What if someone doesn't know what they're looking for?

Because of this, the web report interface’s open search form was swapped out with a dynamically updating select form. The user can explore between year, make, and model, and the web application will update as you change.

I utilized the fetch() API to grab the updated lists, and they are asynchronously rendered as you change your selections. There were some challenges with processing the form asynchronously, however these issues were fixed by checking inputs as well as processing certain items sequentially. Most updates made to server.py and report.html

An additional issue arose during this feature build-out, which was the fact that the application would sometimes disconnect from the database server while rendering data. I wrapped some function calls in while loops to attempt them twice before rendering an error, because usually a connection interruption is fixed almost instantly.