Pet Sentry was made to help owners finding their missing pets. Connecting concerned owners and spotters, hopefully, this traumatic moment can have a happy ending.
So, if your pet has gone missing or if you spotted a wandering pet and want to increase its chance of being retrieved, Pet Sentry might come in handy.
It's simple! As an owner, you simply register a missing alert with your pet name, the last time it was seen, some way to contact you, a short description, and a picture of them. Then, a red marker will be set on the map as a missing alert.
As a spotter, you can follow the same steps and register a sighting, then a blue marker will be set on the same map. With this data, spotters might increase the chance of owners know about the whereabouts of their missing pets.
(Optional) It's recommended to not install required packages globally, but locally under a project subfolder using venv:
python3 -m venv venv
# Windows
venv-name\Scripts\activate.bat # cmd
venv-name\Scripts\activate.ps1 # Power Shell
# Unix
source venv-name/bin/activateThen, install an official release of Django:
python3 -m pip install DjangoInside the project's BASE_DIR folder, execute the following command, substituting "key" for the Google API key:
export API_KEY="key"This will enable the geocoding feature of the application, and everything is ready to go. To make migrations for the sentry app, run:
python3 manage.py makemigrations sentryThen, to apply migrations to the database, run:
python3 manage.py migrateTo build up the local development server execute the command:
python3 manage.py runserverThe default port will be 8000. If you wish to use another one, you can choose it by running:
python3 manage.py runserver xxxxreplacing 'xxxx' with the port number you desire.
This web application was built using Django for the back-end and JavaScript on the front-end. It also makes use of Leaflef.js library for the maps, which was supplied with OpenStreetMap data. On top of that, to enable the geocoding feature, the Google Geocoding API was used.
The application was constructed to be very straightforward. It's only composed of a landing page and the "sentry map" page, which contains the map itself and all the necessary forms. Unless the user chooses to go back to the landing page or refresh the map page itself, they don't need to load anything twice, since the buttons only toggle the visibility of the structures.
The communication between the client and the server is made mostly with AJAX requests. When the user sends a form, the server does the processing and handles back either an 'OK' status or an error message. Being it the first case, the map div will be changed to visible again and the form will be hidden, and the cached data sent to the server is used to add a marker to the map without the need of requesting the whole set of markers again. Or else, in case of error while processing data, the form will not be toggled with the map and an alert will tell the user that something went wrong.
To make possible that JSON files carry images, the uploaded file size had to be limited at 3Mb, and allowed formats restrained to .jpeg (or .jpg), .png, .gif and .bmp. This is due to both the limit size of JSON files and the JavaScript conversion method FileReader.readAsDataURL() of binary data to base64.
