A helpful counterpart app to ODK Collect which facilitates the selection of survey Sites. A Site might be a health facility, an education Facility, or something more generic like a water access point.
The Revisit application is designed to be used in conjunction with ODK Collect. The goal is to streamline the collection of site information by pulling from a central repository of site data. Users of the app can quickly select the site at which they are conducting a survey, reducing manual entry errors and speeding the data entry process. Additionally, users can contribute general site information (name, sector, location, etc.) and fix incorrect information in order to grow and improve the central repository over time.
This project is being developed in Eclipse (ADT), but using gradle for dependency management and builds.
Follow the directions here: http://www.gradle.org/installation
Use the Android SDK Manager (in ADT, it's under the Window menu) to install Google Repository and Android Support Repository. Once these have been installed, clone this project and import it as an Android project into your ADT workspace.
If you clean the project through ADT, you'll get tons of errors. This is because we're using gradle to pull in dependencies, so from Eclipse's perspective they are all missing. The build.gradle file includes a task that will copy the dependencies into the libs directory, which will make Eclipse happier. Navigate to the project directory, and run the gradle task:
$ gradle copyDeps
This is better, but Eclipse is probably still complaining about a few missing dependencies. We need to add the appsupport-v7 library project. Follow the directions here: http://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/setup.html
Tip: When importing this library from the Extras directory, don't forget to check the "copy Projects into workspace" box. This seems to matter.
We'll be building and deploying the application from the command line using gradle, NOT through eclipse (though it will likely still work through eclipse once we've used gradle to grab the dependencies). To build and deploy, plug in the development device (or enable an emulated device), and run:
$ gradle installDebug
After some chugging, it should finish with a success message. If an error occurs, fix the problem and try again.
The Revisit application depends on several open source libraries, outlined here. This list will be updated as these dependencies change, and more information about their implmentation may be added at a later date.
osmdroid is used as the map framework, providing a relatively well documented implementation of Open Street Maps.
Dagger provides dependency injection.
Otto provides the application-wide event bus, used as a light-weight PubSub mechanism.
Retrofit provides a nice REST client system, used in conjunction with RoboSpice.
RoboSpice provides an extra layer of network request niceties (caching, thread management).
Picasso provides a useful way to load and cache images asyncronously.
Jackson makes converting between JSON and POJOs super simple (and fast).
ButterKnife simplifies injecting views and click handlers into Activities and Fragments.
Grout is a small library used for downloading, packaging, and managing offline map tiles. NOTE: this dependency is not yet in Maven Central, and must be built and installed to your local Maven repo. Alternatively, you can build the project locally and copy the compiled .jar file to the libs directory.
NOTE: At this time, site coordinates are stored in the form coordinates: [longitude, latitude]. This is because we want to conform to the FRED API standard for transfering facility data.
Every activity that subclasses BaseActivity has a TAG member that is the class's canonical name (e.g. edu.columbia.sel.revisits.activity.MapActivity). This is useful for debugging on the command line using logcat with grep to filter.
$ adb logcat | grep --line-buffered ".*edu.columbia.sel.revisit.*"
I'd recommend using pidcat or coloredlogcat for a much nicer log viewing experience. For me, pidcat wasn't working consistently, so I used coloredlogcat (renamed logcatc) and added an alias in my .bash_profile for convenience:
alias logfac='adb logcat | grep --line-buffered ".*edu.columbia.sel.revisit*" | logcatc'
Additionally, an APP_TAG member is injected in all activities and the application itself with a value of RevisitApplication. You can log to this tag, and filter on it to view only these log entries.
- Better project description, usage overview
- Image capture
- Documentation
- Basic architecture description