demo instance development

Introduction

Building the 'Demo instance(s)’ of vesuvius so that potential adopters of the project get to have a test run before their final deployment. Currently there is no such framework where the end user can test the vesuvius environment before becoming a persistent user. The Vesuvius demo instance will be hosted at the www.Sahanasoftwarefoundation.org.

Stakeholders
New potential users/organisations

Organisations like hospitals, NGO’s, emergency medical help provider etc who haven’t yet registered at or used the Vesuvius website before will get a trial run at all the facilities provided by Vesuvius, which will help them locate missing people in times of emergencies. They will get a taste of the facilities provided to the different classes of admins viz admin, hospital admin, staff etc and accordingly they can customise. Thus they will get a thorough understanding of how Vesuvius works and how their organisation will benefit by associating with it.

Scope
This is defined by, but not limited to, building a limited lifetime demo-instance for potential customers. The instances for each customer will get periodically refreshed. Depending upon the customer’s commitment higher level of customisation may be possible. A separate instance per customer will be provided with startup configuration. Moreover the revisions in the Vesuvius codebase should get dynamically updated into the demo instances.

Deliverables:

A demo vesuvius instance of sahana vesuvius hosted at the sahana website which will have the following functionalites :

    A site hosted at the Sahana website which will help users create demo instances of the vesuvius for the benefit of potential adopters.

    A framework where users can create their demo instance, get a taste of all the modules of vesuvius, and import or export their data.

    Instances will contain access as different users like admin, hospital admin, hospital staffs etc with different privileges.

    UI for the users to customise their own instances.

    Framework which can effectively pull the changes from the vesuvius new releases.

Project implementation plan :

For the demo instance :-

My approach towards creating and using the demo instance is making use of session ids to keep track of the logged in users. Once a demo user logs in, a session id is generated, and a timestamp gets associated with. Suppose the trial period is 60 mins, so the timestamp will be continuously compared, till the difference is 0. There will be automatic logout on the expiration of the time limit. If the customer wants more trial time it will be done by resetting the timer. The timer will also have resume capability, so that if the user logs out before his trial period is over, he will be able to access his instance for the remaining period of his trial. As the time gets over, the changes in the database associated with that user’s session id will be deleted, and the database will return to its default contents.

As for the different levels of admin, it will follow the same hierarchical structure like in the Vesuvius site, with the site admin setting up the trial time and the hospital admins creating account, reporting missing persons, creating new report, viewing statistics etc. In other words the admin will have access to all the modules provided by Vesuvius. It is very important that the privileges granted to the admins are well maintained so as to prevent unauthorised people from viewing the contents which require admin authorisation.

UI for the customisation.

The user interface will be developed using stylesheets and Javascript. Screenshots of preloaded data can be provided so that the user gets to know what kind of data he needs to enter to use his instance. I am planning to extensively use Javascript and Jquery to improve the look and feel of the wizard and to make as user friendly as possible. The entire process of creating and updating an account in Vesuvius will be well documented (using screenshots) to ease the creation of a new instance. Since the primary goal of this project is to make potential customers at ease with the Vesuvius interface, therefore i think the UI should be as user friendly as possible.

Framework to effectively pull changes from Vesuvius new releases

Yet to be finalised.