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Walnut.Direct

Walnut.Direct is an app created by the Walnut Hills Programming Club to give students straightforward directions between rooms in our large, confusing school. It uses room-finder, a library we created for using Dijkstra's algorithm to generate directions between rooms in a building.

If you want help making changes to Walnut.Direct, feel free to contact Ajai (the former Programming Club president who wrote the majority of this code).

Reporting issues

If you find a problem with the generated directions (including missing rooms and unclear directions) or with the site itself, or you have a suggestion, you can create an issue by clicking on the Issues tab at the top of this page.

You can also look at the Issues page to see some of our known problems and to-dos. Feel free to ask how you can help if there's an issue you want to help with.

How to view and work on the app on your own computer

Stuff to install

  1. GitHub Desktop: At the top of this page, click the green Clone or download button, and then click Open in Desktop. If you don't have GitHub Desktop installed, it should redirect you to the install page, and you can click the Download button.
    • After you install GitHub Desktop, click on the Clone or download button at the top of this page again to clone it if you haven't already.
    • (I recommend using GitHub Desktop since it's easy to use, but it's not required if you know how to use git.)
  2. Install Yarn
    • (This is required to be able to run our app on your computer.)
  3. Install Visual Studio Code (VSCode)
    • (This is my favorite text editor, but it's not required if you prefer something else.)
    • Install the following Visual Studio Code extensions. (Once you've installed the ESLint and Prettier extensions, they will automatically fix a lot of formatting problems whenever you save a file.)
      1. ESLint for linting (finding bugs, bad practices, formatting issues, etc.)
      2. Prettier for code formatting
      3. Vetur for working with .vue Single File Component files

Running the app

  1. If it's not already open, open the project in GitHub Desktop. Click on the Repository menu, then click Open in terminal to open up a terminal window.
  2. Type yarn into the terminal window, and press enter. It will install a bunch of extra things that are required to run the app.
  3. To actually run the app, use the command yarn serve. If you make changes, the page will automatically update when you refresh.

Editing the app

Open the "Directions" folder in Visual Studio Code.

Summary of important files and folders

  1. Generating the directions

    • src/walnut.ts is where we describe our school. This is where we list all of the rooms and hallways that are in our app and how they're connected together.
    • The general code that could apply to any building (not just our school) is in a separate package called room-finder.

  2. The website itself

Making changes

When you have a change you want to make, you can follow the directions here to request that your changes be brought into the main version of our program.

What are all of these tools we're using? What are these .vue and .ts files?

Vue

Vue is a JavaScript framework that makes it easier for us to make user interfaces. One of its features is that it allows us to use .vue files, which include HTML, JavaScript (or TypeScript), and CSS all in one file so that we can keep related things together.

TypeScript (.ts files)

TypeScript is a programming language that's exactly like JavaScript, except it allows us to specify static types in our program. Types make it easier for us not to make mistakes in our programs.

For example, in JavaScript, we would just write

const myVariable = 3;

to define a variable called myVariable, but in TypeScript, we can (optionally) write that myVariable is a number like this:

const myVariable: number = 3;

This makes it easier not to make mistakes. If you ignore these type annotations (which is completely fine), TypeScript is just like regular JavaScript. And you don't have to write the type annotations if you don't want to.

Editing this page

If you want to make this page clearer, you can either follow the instructions above, or you can just edit it directly here on GitHub by editing README.md, which will create a Pull Request.