Back to work

My short trip to Iaşi is over. I attendend the ECODAM 2009 Doctoral Summer Workshop. There I assisted to some very interesting lectures (both from invited speakers and from other PhD students) and I also gave a talk about bonds representations in Ising spin glasses.

Unfortunatelly, last moment problems before leaving stopped me from submitting the last week's work summary and once got there my online time was very limited (between lectures, organizing activities, and spending time with my favorite niece). Therefore I'll do a two week summary in one post.

I finished the code for retrieving riffs metadata from Riffly. This is used when the user manually adds a riff to the repository.

I refactored the JavaScript code for integration of Riffly callback API with Moodle. It's much cleaner now, using AJAX POST to send the data back to Moodle repository and callback functions to update the File Picker location only if the riff ID was correctly stored in Moodle. If the store process fails, the the File Picker location will not change, so the user will be able to retry.

One problem that gave me major headaches (especially because I didn't have an Internet connection to search for more data) was the inconsistence between YUI's asyncRequest docs and implementation. Documentation says that the callback can be a function or an object. This is either wrong, or Moodle's YUI version it's older, because a function doesn't work. Finally I found the solution: use an object with success and failure methods.

When I updated code from CVS, I got the surprise that the HTML meta got deprecated from print_header. I was using it to inject some small JavaScript code (a hack, I know). Anyway, I had to learn about the new way to do it: using the require dynamic property of the global $PAGE variable. So now, the JS is on its own file, connection to Moodle through the riffly JavaScript variable.

Finally, I applied for write access in contrib/plugins/repository/riffly so I can start to commit.

To do: these are some ideas that might be good to implement:

• automatically select a newly recorded file (to save the user a few clicks);
• implement a text filter (Jerome sugested to look at the youtube filter for an example) instead of using flash objects;
• create a TinyMCE plugin to make recording easier than it is now (about 3 mouse clicks instead of the current 6 clicks).