SDSM:Historical Changes

This document consists of multiple parts; for a directory to all of the parts, see SDSM:Index.

Description

This part of the SDS Modernization (SDSM) document enumerates a not necessarily exhaustive list of historical changes or improvements that were made to SDS, made by Darren Duncan if by whom is not otherwise specified.

It exists to provide visibility into historical progress of the SDS Modernization (SDSM) project about which this document otherwise mainly just describes the current state of SDS.

This list often but not always corresponds to the list of Git pull requests at https://git.smus.ca which most readers of this document are not privileged to see directly.

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SDS Laravel: Fixing Broken Behavior

2024 Apr 18: User Preferences Screen Fails To Display

Context:

• User darren.duncan attempted to visit their User Preferences screen, example urls https://api.smus.ca/User/Preferences (production) and https://api-latest.smus.ca/User/Preferences (preview).

Observed Behavior:

• In production, a non-graceful generic 500 internal server error message was displayed rather than the expected User Preferences screen. In preview, the revealed underlying symptom was that the code line in PreferencesController of $addresses = $user->guardian->addresses; was dying with Attempt to read property addresses on null.

• The problem occurred for user darren.duncan but not for other users.

Expected Behavior:

• The User Preferences screen should always display, regardless of whether the user in question is a guardian or has guardians. If some functionality of the screen is not applicable for users that aren't or don't have guardians, the screen should either hide that functionality or explain why it doesn't apply or both.

Applied Solution:

• The dying code line was replaced with code that only tried to fetch and return an address list when it was valid to do so, and it returned an empty list otherwise. As a result, the User Preferences screen never failed to display under this scenario.

Caveat:

• While the User Preferences screen no longer fails to display, as of the completion of this fix, it still remained true that the functionality to actually display the fetched address list in question was never implemented, and so for every user, the screen carried the placeholder message Shows address info instead of each individual address.

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