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Preparing & Planning
12:09During this course we'll use the Four P's of Problem Solving: Preparation, Plan, Perform and Perfect.
During this project we'll employ a problem
solving methodology known as The 4 P's
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of Problem Solving.
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First, Preparation, where we understand
the problem and
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think of a high level solution.
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Second, Plan, where we plan out the
solution.
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Third, Perform, where we perform the
actions required for
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our proposed solution.
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And finally, fourth, we Perfect the
solution.
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Perfecting doesn't mean that the projects
will be perfect when we get to the end of
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the perfecting stage, but we'll be
incrementally improving the project
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with more Preparation, Planning and
Performing.
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Once we're done you may want to improve
the project and
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perform some of your own perfections.
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Let's jump into some preparation and
planning.
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Hit the launch work space button
accompanying the video and follow along.
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So when you launch a work space,
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you should see a panel like this where you
can edit files in here,
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you've got your console down here and your
files on the left hand side.
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You can even download the files to your
local machine if you would prefer
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doing it that way.
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But for this course we're gonna be using
work spaces.
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We don't need to worry about installing
anything on our machine.
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We can just code and get to work.
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So we're gonna combine the preparation and
planning phases.
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The preparation phase is just taking a
look at all the files and
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the tools at our disposal and
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seeing if we can figure out what the
problem is and what the solution is.
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So let's take a look in our app.js file,
and it's empty, so
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this is where we're gonna put the bulk of
our code, I'm gonna just write
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a comment saying the problem, and let's do
another comment for solution.
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Cool.
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And we've got some design files here.
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I've actually downloaded these to my local
machine so I can preview them, and
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let's take a look in the HTML, index.html,
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and as you can see we can type in a
username.
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So we can type in waldo.
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And click on search, this wouldn't do
anything right now because it's not
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a dynamic site, but if we view the page's
source
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you can see we've got a form at the bottom
posting to the home location.
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And this is what the profile would look
like, we've got a avatar.
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We've got the username.
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We've got the badges earned, and we've got
the JavaScript points.
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So, we would need to somehow populate this
information ourselves dynamically.
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And there's an error.HTML file which shows
this error at the top here.
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But it, it's got the same contents down
here as the home.
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Or the search, so we should bear that in
mind in the future.
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So lets take a look back at our files.
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We've got an index profile, an example
profile,
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sorry, and we can click on the X here just
to get some more space.
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We can always show our console again by
clicking on View show.
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Console, or hide console to hide it again,
and in here we've got
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the var Profile which requires the profile
JS file which is this,
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and it gets a studentProfile with the
username of "chalkers", which is me.
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Let's read this here.
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When the JSON body is fully received the
end event is triggered and
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the full body is given to the handler or
callback, so what that
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basically is saying is that when we've
downloaded the JSON from the treehouse API
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an end event gets triggered, and the full
body is returned to a callback, so.
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This is the console dir method so
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the JSON body will get given to that and
it will print out to the console
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in the pretty format you know where the
object looks fancy.
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And then if this a parsing, network, or
HTTP error.
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An object is passed to the handler or call
back.
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So let's just see if this actually
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works by typing node example_profile.js.
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Hit enter and it spits out that.
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Lovely JSON.
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If you want to see what the JSON looks
like yourself,
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you can go to
teamtreehouse.com\username.json.
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Now if a user has got privacy settings,
you may not be able to see all the users.
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You can only just see the ones that
publicly share the badge information.
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So I've got a Chrome extension and I can
click on this minus sign for example, and
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I can just make things shorter so I can
see things a lot clearer.
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I can see that the badges is an array so I
can get the length of that for
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the total count of badges.
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And we've got here the points with the
JavaScript topic with
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the amount of JavaScript points I've got.
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So I can access this JSON by that
profile.js file.
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And then finally let's take a look at
Node.JS just to make sure that we can
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do the things that we want to do.
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So if we go to the docs and API DOCS.
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And HTTP, we can create a server, so
that's we wanna do.
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And we want to read files from a file
system,
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which I'm sure we can find some methods in
here for accessing the file system.
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So, so going back to our code now, we can.
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Try and give a stab at what the problem
is, what the solution is, and
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plan out that solution.
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So, we need a simple way
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to look at a user's badge count.
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And JavaScript
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points from a web browser.
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We could easily do this in a console but
judging by the designs we want to actually
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do this as an HTML page in the server on
the internet.
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And the solution would be use
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Node.JS to perform the profile look ups
and
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serve our templates via HTML HTTP sorry.
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So we're gonna use node to go out and
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get all the profile information used in
the profile.js file, and
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we're gonna create a server and serve out
all of our index profile with error pages.
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So yeah, that's cool.
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Now let's plan out the solution.
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Let's break this down into digestible
chunks.
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I'm gonna close the console again and say
1.
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create a web server.
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2.
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We want a handle, the HTTP route,
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or if you're British root.
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So the home route where, when it's open a
domain name or what, what have you,
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this will show the search, field, for
example.
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So, we've got this form at the bottom here
and it uses the post method and
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it goes to the home route as well, so we
need to handle that as well.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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So, that handles the searching side of
things.
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And now we want to handle the HTTP
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route for get/username.
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So, we would like a nice clean URL
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when we type in whatever this domain name
is, slash.
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The username so like slash chalkers.
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Or slash Dave McFarland or something like
that.
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So number 4.
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And finally we want to function that
handles the reading..
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Of files so the, the templates that we
have.
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And merge in values.
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So when we go out to the internet, get the
information,
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we want to populate that into our
profile.html.
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Right now it's started with all those
information but
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we want it to be everybody's information.
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So I think those are the 4 main components
of our application.
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Let's just try and break down each one
into.
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More digestible chunks.
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So, we create the web server and
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then I'm gonna write some pseudo code.
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So, pseudo code means that it's not
exactly code but
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you should be able to get the jist of what
it is.
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So, if the URL is equal to slash and GET.
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We want to show the search field.
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Cool.
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So if the URL.
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Is equal to slash.
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And it's a Post.
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We want to redirect to the username.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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So if the URL is equal to slash anything.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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We want to get the.
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JSON from treehouse.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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and then on the end that's when all the
dates come back.
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We want to show the profile and
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if there's an error.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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We want to show the error.
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So I think that covers handling the user
route.
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So if I type in chalkers, it will show my
chalkers information.
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If I do chalkers 1 2 3, that doesn't exist
so it should show an error.
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And finally, we need to read from file and
get a string.
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And then we want to merge.
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Values into string.
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So we do a quick search of the, the
template file and we just
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populate the information that we get from
the, from the JSON from treehouse.
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Cool.
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Now our planning doesn't go into every
single detail but it's enough for
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us to get going, we can always add more to
it later.
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