Final Phase Week 1: Project Comments & Notifications

Hola guys!! We are now into the finale of GSoC Programme. This Week was focussed on improvements in mobile_app & implementation of project_comments with fcm_notifications.

Project’s Comments

PR #1590 aimed at implementing comments for projects. commontator is being used for handling comments in projects (acts_as_commontable). Skimming through the commontator codebase helped develop a better understanding of how things actually works and implement those as per our requirements..

comments_serializer has got several attributes like has_edit_access (@comment.can_be_edited_by?(@current_user)), has_delete_access (@comment.can_be_deleted_by?(@current_user)) keeping in mind the accessibility options for the user.

Also project_serializer now has various thread attributes including thread_id (@project.commontator_thread.id) to be able to fetch comments for any project/commontable.

FCM Notifications

Push notifications can be an excellent way to drive user engagement. FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) was the service choosen for setting up cross-platform mobile notifications. This will be based on the gem fcm which is kind of a service to hit FCM APIs. Takes in the fcm_tokens and queues up the notifications to be sent.

FCM Token - A random string to uniquely identify any mobile device notification needs to be sent to.

class Fcm < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user

  validates :token, presence: true
  validates :user_id, uniqueness: true
end

class User < ApplicationRecord
  ...
  has_one :fcm, dependent: :destroy
  ...
end

Uniqueness validation for user_id & not null/empty validation for token is handled at database level (migrations) too..

The flow that i came up with as follows.. User opens the mobile_app, in the login_viewmodel or signup_viewmodel after successful login/signup, sends fcm_token to server through /api/v1/fcm/token. Thereafter, fcm_token (@user.fcm.token) uniquely identifies the device notifs needs to be sent to.. and Voila we have the notif hanging in the tray..

API Enhancements

PR #1581 aims to improve the project’s API with the following highlights:

• public_featured & public_users_projects must be available without being authenticated.
• User’s Favourites available at /api/v1/users/:id/favourites

Another PR #1510 was reviewed & merged (:tada:) which aimed at implementing oauth flow for the API. Token validation was taken care of by fetching user_info using access_tokens which in turn validates them too :)..

Next Steps

Currently working on improving on testing suite i.e adding specs for project_comments & fcm_notifications.. Adding RichText editor for project description in the mobile_app. Finally adding tests for mobile_app’s viewmodels, interactions and UI would conclude the awesome journey we all have been a part of..