Week 4: A Functional Site

Last week, I asked the graduate student overseeing our project about the design of the tools and whether they should be run client-side or server-side. She wisely suggested that we don't worry about that issue right now and instead focus on getting a functional site running using dummy data on the "server". I think this is still an issue we will someday have to deal with, but in the meantime we can work on building the site itself.

Our Site

Currently, our site has a landing page and a button to link to the visualization tool (LineUp). The following images are screenshots of the landing page:

Figure 1: Top of our landing page. The bar graph is animated.
Figure 2: Further down on the landing page. Notice the Visualize button which will direct to LineUp
 The next step is linking LineUp to the Visualize button. Just above the part of the page in Figure 2, there is a part for selecting datasets. The user will select a dataset, then select a tool to use (e.g. Visualize or Build). Upon clicking the Visualize button, the page will direct to the Visualize tool (LineUp) with the specified dataset.

The Problem

As it currently stands, upon starting LineUp, a "loadData" method is called which references datasets in the media/ folder in the source directory. Basically, LineUp starts statically. This needs to change so that when LineUp is invoked, it loads in the dataset that I give it.

The Solution

I think the way to solve this is to modify the loadData method to take in a file path. The file path will be the location of my new dataset. I then need to trace the loadData method up to make sure the file path is passed accordingly.

This should be a simple fix, but experience has shown that it is always more complicated. Until next week!

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