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Development Instructions of Dashboard

Dashboard is a typical Node.js web application that utilizes Express.js framework.

Key Packages

As you may know, a Node.js application depends heavily on the modules it uses, you may take a took in package.json.

Here are some important ones,

  • Express.js, The framework we are using. Currently, we are using the Express4.
  • Mongoose, The mongodb object modeling tool.
  • Async.js, As all I/O operations in Node.js all asynchronous, we use the Async.js module to control the asynchronous workflow.
  • Lo-Dash, Node.js utility library.
  • Formage, Mongoose monitoring tools.
  • Mocha, Chai, Packages that used for testing.

Project Structure

Currently, we organize the code this way.

/.                          where all documentation and scripts lie
--/app                      all basic funtional source files
----/app/models             where all Mongoose model lies
----/app/routes             where the routers are defined
----/app/user-modules       optional add-ons which adds additional functionality
--/templates                view templates
--/logs                     the log files
--/resource                 static resources
--/tests                     tests should reside here.

Note

  • You'd better use corresponding structure between app/routes and templates/views.
  • For modules, you may refer to existing modules, like openmrs-contrib-id-oauth.

Testing

The testing files are under tests folder. If you want to run it, first you should add a conf.js under this folder. Currently it only holds a mongoURI attribute to specify the testing database, we advise you to use a different one from the normal database, in order to prevent it from being messed up. However, in the part that testing synchronization with OpenLDAP, we are using the same database as production. So be careful with that. If you have any ideas how to improve this, please make a PR.

To run the test, type npm test which would call tests/runner.

Caveat: You may have noticed that some tests requires app/logger. We did a patch for log4js, which adds a addLogger method to it. In order to require modules that used log4js, you need to require the source to make the patch available.

Development Rules

Whatever by the design or due to history, we have some implicit rules.

  • Code style, we are following the Felix's. You should follow it in most cases. However, remember it's not like the absolute laws that you cannot violate, it's just a guideline.

  • Globals are bad and other stuff that would create strong coupling.

  • Routes structure, we tend to split different logic of routes into different files. You may refer details in the project.

  • Please use feature branches and try to keep your PRs to one commit, check out our development guide for more information on how to do that.

  • For issue tracking purposes, please open a corresponding issue for a pull request, here

  • Comments, it's a good habit to constantly add explanatory comments. When a part of logic is too long, and when some code is complicated, just add few comments. And for some functions that maybe used externally, you may add full JSDoc.

Helpful Tools

For keeping a good code style and prevent possible pitfalls, JSHint is highly recommended.