Team:Michigan Software/Design
Michigan Software 2015
Design
HTML, CSS, and Javascript were used to create the user interface for Protocat. The intent was to design the site in a way that makes it easy for users to create, find, and use any protocol on our database. We used Bootstrap for its HTML grid layout to format our pages.
On our backend, we used the Django web framework designed for Python 3.4. Django is a convenient framework to use because it is able manage administration, databases, authentication, and templating data on HTML pages, as well as other useful features. It is also fairly simple to learn because of it's Model-View-Controller (MVC) system. To create the database we created a "class Protocol," the model of a protocol for our database. Attributes in our Protocol class are properties associated with a protocol, such as name, reagents, and steps. We then migrate these models through Django which creates our database for us. Whenever we want to make changes to our models, all we have to do is migrate the changes through Django which will change our database accordingly. Django comes with its own user system, so there is no need for us to make a user model.
We have two databases, one for protocols and one for users. When someone signs up for Protocat, their username, email, password, first, and last name are added to the user database. Likewise, when someone uploads a protocol, all attributes of the protocol are saved into the protocol database.
When uploading a protocol, the author is automatically chosen to be the username name of the uploader, taken from the user database. Each uploaded protocol is also given an auto-incremented id number. This id is used when making queries to the database to view a protocol, and helps differentiate protocol with the same name.
Uploading protocols and signing up for Protocat is the Controller in the MVC system because this is how we allow users to interact with the database. When people view protocols from the database is where the View comes in to play.