As a Consumer, I want to go to a URL and view the name of a particular institution so that I know it exists

[ultrasaurus]

As a Consumer, I want to go to a URL and view the details of that particular institution so that I can get a good feel for the data that matters to me.

I should see the School Name.

[shawnbot]

For now, since we're doing the whole site statically, we'll have to use either of the following URL schemes:

URL	pros	cons
/school/?{id}	looks good	no additional query string parameters
/school/?id={id}	supports other query string params	kinda ugly
/school/#id	looks good	requires client-side logic to refresh, may conflict with fragment identifiers

My preference is to use the query string rather than the hash, and since I don't think that we'll need to vary the state of the page on any other query string parameters the first one should work. Thoughts, @ultrasaurus?

(edit: replaced inst in URLs with school)

[ErieMeyer]

Hmm -- why "inst" instead of "school"?

and will the id = 8347238947 or will the id = OhioState

[shawnbot]

Good call, @ErieMeyer. inst => school. @ultrasaurus and I are talking about this as we design the API today too.

[shawnbot]

As for the IDs, I'm actually not sure. If the names are truly unique then we can use them. @dnesting, do you know if that's the case?

[LisaGee]

I opened up the sample data file. Looks like there are 5 Academy of Cosmetology
I’d guess we can’t guarantee uniqueness.

From: Shawn Allen [mailto:notifications@github.com]
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 1:19 PM
To: 18F/college-choice
Subject: Re: [college-choice] As a Consumer, I want to go to a URL and view the details of that particular institution (#2)

As for the IDs, I'm actually not sure. If the names are truly unique then we can use them. @dnestinghttps://github.com/dnesting, do you know if that's the case?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/2#issuecomment-114187562.

[shawnbot]

Well, if having a name in the URL is important, we could compose a "primary key" from multiple fields. Or maybe we just use the format:

{id}-{name}

Then we could have URLs like:

/school/?12345-Academy-of-Cosmetology

and we would only pay attention to the first {id} bit. I've seen this technique used elsewhere (maybe real estate sites?) and it seems solid.

[shawnbot]

Moving this back into acceptance. Here's a URL to test:

https://pages-staging.18f.gov/college-choice/school/?1545-Nienow-University

A couple of things that we might consider, preferably as separate tasks:

1. A more explanatory "loading" state that's visible until the school data is loaded.
2. Update the window title so it makes more sense as a browser tab than just "School":