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Week 4 - Autocomplete website/widget: you-speak-newspeak

(the repo name references Newspeak from 1984, but we changed the project to use Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange)

BFNJ - Emmanuel, Jack, Georgia and Colette

Task

Build a site which will update as you type (an autocompleter).

Here is the task for this week on GitHub

Requirements:

  • A website that enables users to quickly find and select words from a list of suggestions, as they type.
  • The list is dynamically generated from a pre-populated list of values (i.e. a dictionary file), leveraging searching and filtering.
  • A large data file is required to search through - consider the best data structure for this (e.g. .txt or .json).
  • Consider how implementation affects user experience and web performance (e.g. time to load and search through the data file).

Goals:

  • We expect back-end testing using tape (test as many components as you can).
  • Basic front-end testing. Please note that we expect tests on pure functions and not on the router or the DOM.
  • Host your project on heroku, see resource.
  • Use module.exports and require to break a single large server file into smaller modules.
  • Consider what would be a good server file structure based on what we have discussed over the week.

What's gone well (or perhaps better phrased as what's not gone too badly)

  • Deploying on Heroku wasn't as difficult as we expected (once we got the hang of it!)
  • Agreeing on a file structure - one of the first things we did
  • Setting up correctly - installing on our dependencies etc from the beginning of the project!
  • Spending a lot of time mobbing together - this week has been really difficult and working through everything slowly together seems to have been more productive than working in pairs.

What's gone less well

  • Testing - pretty non existent!
  • Getting our heads around the relationship between back end and front end.
  • Getting our handlers to work and understanding why js and css files need paths even though they're not files the user would ever navigate to.

What have we learnt?

  • That Node.js is not our friend... yet. And it's &^%$%£@ difficult to get your head around!
  • But hopefully we all feel a tiny bit more confident with Node.
  • We've managed to set up our handlers and get our pages AND our CSS and JS files working. Woohoo!!
  • Our JS is a bit messy and still needs work but it's doing stuff... if only we could have another day...

What is our site supposed to do?

So it's supposed to translate English words into their Nadsat equivalent. The user types in an English word, which autocompletes if it has an equivalent in the file, and then the html page will load the translation for you.

What can our website actually do so far?

  • Enter a word to translate (but it won't translate yet)
  • Autocomplete results from a test object appear (the object's keys are the English words, while the values are the Nadsat words)
  • Currently they appear as text, but there is a commented out version that makes them appear as separate buttons - that version is likely closer to the final, functioning version, but it is unfinished and has an issue that needs ironing out
  • There is an event listener checking for if the enter button is pressed - this links up to the function that takes the input as an argument and returns the translation - however, the translation is not shown yet
  • The submit button does not have the same event listener yet
  • Clicking the autocomplete suggestions does not do anything yet (in either version of the code that shows the suggestions on the screen)