I haven’t posted a blog entry in a while, due mostly to spring break and to excessive amounts of midterms; after this Monday, hopefully things will die down and I’ll be able to focus more on the current issues rather than 3 exams.

Before break, I met with Presley to do a review of the survey representation code currently up on Github. We discussed with Emma the issue of whether the library should output JSON or a CSV, and determined that spitting out the JSON directly was bypassing a large portion of the SurveyMan Java backend (not sure of the terminology), and that it might be better to generate some different intermediate form to be passed to the Java. I’m just leaving it as is for now until we figure out something better. Emma created an issue before I left for break regarding calling the java program directly from the python, but we need to fix the issues I’ve been having with SurveyMan and Windows before I can do this.

Presley also suggested that I create an untested branch to push to, but Emma said it was probably unnecessary, since only tested/working changes would be pulled into the main project from my fork anyway. I had been holding off on pushing anything until I figured out how to create an untested branch, but after discussing it with Emma I just committed and pushed my changes to the master branch.

My most recent commits include adding an exceptions class which includes exceptions for bad branching and referencing questions/options/blocks that don’t exist. I implemented a first pass at a validate method for the survey that checks if the survey has all the blocks referenced in the constraints; I haven’t implemented checks for backwards branching yet. I made a few changes in places where I had originally been printing out error messages, throwing exceptions instead. I hope to get started next week on the test module to determine that all of this actually works correctly.

I also created another sample survey based off of a survey that I found in data/samples. This was meant to demonstrate subblocks, since my original survey did not make use of them. However, I haven’t really done anything with it besides just print out the survey structure and eyeball it to make sure it looks right. Again, I should probably create more samples with different properties.