[server ip]/bigbluebutton/polls.jsp?poll=[webKey]

Now, the only way I’ve seen to get the server IP is through INetAddress.getLocalHost(), but it always returns 127.0.0.1 and the method getHostName() always gives me firstuser-desktop. Obviously, this doesn’t work. Interestingly, client-side polling has worked perfectly this whole time with the same setup.

Anyway, none of the fixes I find online are clear enough for me to tell if they are applicable to this situation or not, so I hesitate to try any of them. I’m a bit stuck as to what to do, here.

UPDATE: Alright, good, the web keys delete when they’re supposed to. It can probably be done a little more elegantly, I suppose. Anyway, next step is to impose that upper limit so that people entering the web key on their smartphones don’t have nine digits to type into a URL.

UPDATE: The upper limit works! We now have the capability to store just shy of ten thousand web polls at once, far more than we’ll ever need when you consider that polls and their corresponding web keys (if any) are destroyed when the room closes.

UPDATE: Sure enough, when I came back to the problem today (after fixing a bug Chad spotted in vote tracking that would have screwed everything up in stress-testing once web polls were active) I was able to fix it. I moved the client-side web key generation logic into the Statistics Window initialization method, taking it out of the Poll Instructions Window entirely, and added a flag to determine whether the poll is being reviewed (opened from the Polling Menu after being published at least once) or re-posted; the end result is that a new key is generated each time it is published.

There’s still some fine-tuning and testing to be done, but that’s the core of my part of the web polling; Chad’s working on the actual web polling interface.

Off-topic, I’ve noticed that lately when I finish writing an entry in this blog and go to post it, or save something in gedit, or want to send an e-mail, my left hand just automatically goes to hit Ctrl-Shift-S (the keyboard shortcut for saving all open tabs in Eclipse). Amazing how quickly something like that just becomes muscle memory.

Remember how I was talking about streamlining the way that the various events that zip around in the Polling Module handle the polls? I am SO glad today that I took the time to do that. In order to develop the capability for web polling, I’ve had to add two more fields (so far) to the hash; before I streamlined this, that would have involved hours of searching through all the various events and their interactions and trying to figure out what does and doesn’t need to be changed.

Now I have only a handful of places where I need to change code to add a new hash, and I’ve even got a comment block in each of the Poll and PollObject classes to remind me where those are. Totally worth it!

]]> http://justintrobinson.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/sweet-sweet-justification/feed/ 0 justintrobinson http://justintrobinson.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/iconic/ http://justintrobinson.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/iconic/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:10:03 +0000 Justin http://justintrobinson.wordpress.com/?p=400 ]]> I am completely stuck on assigning icons to the various polls that are displayed in the Polling menu. I want to have one icon next to the poll name if it is saved but not published, and a different icon once that item has been published. For now, though, I’d be happy to get even ONE icon to appear. All the examples I’ve been able to find deal with hard-coding the iconField in MXML, while I need it to be dynamically assigned as the program runs via Actionscript. Does anyone in the audience have any thoughts on the matter?

UPDATE: And for some odd reason, no matter how I try to rearrange the Menu code to append an X to closed polls (as a stand-in for the icon) it simply spazzes right out and doesn’t work properly.

UPDATE: I got sick of hardly understanding how my own code worked, so I completely redesigned the ToolbarButton; now that things are a little more streamlined, we can finally have a visual indicator for which polls have been published and which ones haven’t. It’s only an X before the poll’s name, because the icons still won’t work, but it’s far better than the mess it was before!

UPDATE: Excellent, the stats window gave me remarkably little trouble! Now I just need to figure out how to put icons next to polls in the menu based on their open/closed status.

UPDATE: Alright, since I first published this I have made some headway. The “save poll” chain of events has been streamlined how I wanted, but more importantly now I know that what I’m trying to do will work, and the major work of updating the nc.call which converts a PollObject.as into a Poll.java for client-server communication is done. Doing good so far.

UPDATE: Still working hard on streamlining the access to Poll objects, and I just eliminated a major flaw in how polls were invoked. Previously, there was a block of code in the PollInvoker.invoke method, which actually retrieves data from Redis and stores it in a Poll object, where we just plain had to remember how many fields were in the hash besides the dynamically-generated answers and votes; basically, we had no way of knowing at runtime if the particular poll we were looking for had two answers or ten (and as many fields tracking the votes), so we created the variable otherFields that would hold the number of fields in the hash that we knew would always be there. It was sloppy, and we were never really happy with it. In the course of updating all this stuff though, I took the opportunity to move otherFields into the Poll.java itself as a private static int, and included a static method to retrieve it when needed. We still need to update the number, but now it’s kept in the same place that we’ll already be when we add a new field. Phew!

UPDATE: Alright, I think (THINK) that I have everything covered now. I went through each Event and changed the ones that needed multiple Poll pieces to just use an entire PollObject, and ran a Workspace search for each of those Events to change the way that they were dealt with throughout the application. I was not expecting it all to take this long, to be honest. I’m just recompiling everything to make sure it still works; if it does, I’ll be making a very triumphant commit to GitHub!

UPDATE: Sure enough, something about re-opening a saved poll has stopped working. Time to riddle this code with LogUtil messages before getting out of here for the weekend!

UPDATE: Getting close, there’s a problem now with publishing polls to Viewers.

UPDATE: Back at work! I tracked down the problem from before the weekend; sure enough, I overlooked a few places where I had to change how I refer to parts of the polls that get passed back and forth.

UPDATE: Alright, there’s another problem fixed. The voting window shows properly to the viewers now, and the stats window shows up properly to the presenter and refreshed properly. After lunch, I’ll make sure that stopping the poll still works, and then the next task is to get the stats for a previously-published poll to display in a stats window when the presenter wants to open it.

UPDATE: Frustrating. The list of polls in the Polling menu doesn’t update properly anymore, and the logic is somehow failing when the presenter starts a poll, publishes it, closes it, and tries to create a new poll; somewhere around clicking Preview it breaks down.

http://lifehacker.com/5883372/set-gmail-as-your-browsers-default-email-client-with-a-simple-hack

UPDATE: Of course, it would help if I didn’t leave out a bunch of logic right in the middle. Kind of difficult to return an array of statuses when the getStatuses function automatically returns null.