Notes on app development:
Weekend of May 27 and 28:
- went through process of deciding and pitching projects.
- chose MT Women's App
- Initial goals:
- integrate with medical api to provide search functionality for doctors, symptoms, and other health info
- integrate with Google Maps API to show locations of local service providers -chatbot (optional)
- Initial User profiles:
- UM College student
- local high school student
- rural mother
- Native American woman living on a reservation
- middle-aged divorced woman new to the contemporary dating scene
- searched for appropriate medical APIs
- decided to try Medline Plus from US National Library of Medicine
Week of May 29-June3
- Worked on getting MedlinePlus API to work, but decided against using it.
- Took a lot of time to get initial XMLHttpRequest to work. Data was in XML which was unfamiliar format.
- Created a separate server:
- Had to get npm package in order to parse the XML into json.
- Had to get npm package to handle extra access-control headers
- Had difficulty getting api call to work with React. The problem ended up being with how we accessed the response data. Data was in deep tree structure. Required us to specify exact path to data in order for it to display in state in React.
- Data displayed, but included html.
- Had to get npm package and run it on data before sending it to state.
- Decided that it was going to be too difficult with the time we had to figure out how to specify the search query that would give us the results we wanted because of the deep tree structure.
- Decided that our user most likely would be looking not for general health information but more of symptom checking. Resolved to look into a different symptom checker API and to either go that route or create own database.
Week of June 5-12
* got APIMedic symptom checker API up and running. Using the sandbox API since it is good for development and doesn't have any transaction limits.
* figured out how to create multiple entry points for webpack and then how to divide up the bundles into different bundles. Since we didn't want to mess up our third-party API code we decided to try bundling it into a separate webpack bundle.
* Changed some of the code in the selector.js file so that it would only show the woman/girl avatars. However, the changes somehow screwed up the links to the css styling and broke the code. Once the full code for all avatars was restored the symptom checker worked again. Will have to be careful modifying any of the styling or elements in the current selector.js file so as not to break it again.
Week of June 20
* to get symptom checker in a react element
- Put api call in ComponentDidMount() section before render()
- resolve td valign issue in react (currently not working)
Credits:
npm packages/3rd party code/APIs:
-material-design-icons from Google
-Apimedic for symptom checker
-react-gmaps (facilitating interface with Google Maps API)
-flexbox-react
-Google Places API
future ideas:
* more interactivity--> getting more results on doctors and pharmacies pages, allowing for specific text searches (e.g. counselors)