iaa-mvp

A minimum viable product for filling out IAAs.

Very much in alpha. To track work in progress, visit our public Trello board: https://trello.com/b/1DeHImIq/iaa-forms

Milestones

Milestone 1

• Stand up site on Cloud Foundry
• CRUD for Form 7600A

Milestone 2

• CRUD for Form 7600B
• Stretch goal: generate the actual PDF (move to milestone 2 if not accomplished)

Milestone 3

• Integrate with client-facing forms

Under the hood

It's just Meteor.

To run locally, have the GitHub API set up, and run:

meteor run --settings config/settingsDev.json

GitHub API

This applicatioh uses the accounts-ui and accounts-github Meteor packages to handle logins (meaning you log in with your GitHub account).

To run this app locally, copy config/settingsDev.json.sample (rename to settingsDev.json) and add the appropriate API keys.

Deployment

See devops for Cloud Foundry help/setup if you don't have an account (18F staff only).

Initial setup

Clone the repo, and run cf push to intialize your application. The deploy will likely fail, but that is ok.

Create a GitHub application and set the following environment variables:

cf set-env iaa-mvp GITHUB_CLIENT_ID thegithubclientid
cf set-env iaa-mvp GITHUB_SECRET thegithubsecret

Ensure you have access to MongoDB by running cf marketplace. If you don't, contact #devops in Slack. The output should look like:

service             plans                                    description   
elasticsearch       free                                     Elasticsearch search service   
elasticsearch-new   free                                     Elasticsearch 1.5 service for application development and testing   
mongodb-new         free                                     MongoDB service for application development and testing   
postgresql          default                                  PostgreSQL database   
rds                 shared-psql, micro-psql*, medium-psql*   RDS Database Broker   

Here, we're using the mongodb-new service. To see the plans, run cf marketplace -s mongodb-new, which returns:

service plan   description   free or paid   
free           medium        free   

There's only one plan, free, which is what we'll use here. Create the service:

cf create-service mongodb-new free iaa-mongo

Then bind the service:

cf bind-service iaa-mvp iaa-mongo

Finally, restage:

cf restage iaa-mvp

Deploy

cf push

Tour of the codebase

This is all subject to change fairly rapidly, but this is the current state of codebase organization:

• client: contains static assets such as CSS files and images.
• config: contains configuration and routes.js. routes.js uses the Iron Router to define routes along with some lightweight controllers.
• lib: contains utility code that could be used anywhere else in the codebase. Ideally it should be completely application-agnostic. For example, right now it has only us_states.js, a Javascript object that has a list of US states and their two-letter abbreviations. This is used to populate select boxes in our forms.
• models: contains our models. Model files should include the Mongo Collection definition, CRUD operations, Meteor publishing code, and allow/deny logic.
• views: contains HTML templates and client-side UI logic. Subfolders such as 'form7600a' and index will contain a main HTML template along with events.js, helpers.js, and rendered.js files. events.js is home to code that responds to events such as form submissions. helpers.js makes functions available inside of HTML templates. rendered.js is home to code that executes once the template is rendered. This would be a good place to store custom JQuery that would normally wait for $(document).ready(). Other HTML files in the views folder are somewhat more miscellaneous, such as the layout template, the 404 page, and a helper for selecting US states in an HTML select tag.

When in doubt, read the Meteor docs.