Alex Camacho - 12/29/15

This is for PROJECT 4 of the Udacity Full Stack Nanodegree

All comments made by me in the code begin with "# Camacho - "

I created the Session and SessionForm classes in the models file and made sure most of the endpoints functions return the SessionForm object.

When creating a session through the API explorer, the user will have the choice to enter any of the fields available, but they MUST enter the session's name and the websafe key of the conference to which they want to link the session. The websafe key can be found in the details of the conference in the datastore, or in the entity details of the admin site if deploying locally. Once created, the session will have the conference's key registered as its ancestor, thus making the ability to search for all sessions of a particular conference very easy.

The Sessions have name, wsck, highlights, speaker, duration, typeOfSession, date, and starttime properties. All of them, save for date and starttime, are String values (date is a Date type). I thought it would be easiest to work with strings for almost all of the values, since it would allow the users flexibility to enter them in whatever format they wanted. starttime was created as a TimeProperty object, a list of which can be easily sorted by calling the sort function on it (for example, if t is a list of time objects, you can sort them by calling t.sort()).

getSessionsBySpeaker and getConferenceSessionsByType both only require the one input their names imply (speaker, type of conference).

I decided to make speakers just a string value in the Session class, feeling that having a whole other class just for speakers was needless.

A user's wishlist will be created as soon as they log into the site.

Adding/Deleting sessions in a user's wishlist only requires the entity key of the session they would like to add or delete, found either in the datastore or the admin site if deploying locally.

I ensured the appropriate indexes were available by first testing the site locally, then deploying to appspot.

Extra query 1: It is conceivable that a user that's a fan of a particular speaker would only want to attend a certain type of session, a lecture for example. The code for this query would look like this:

q = Session.query().
filter(Session.speaker=='Jon Stewart').
filter(Session.typeOfSession=='workshop')

Extra query 2: For the purposes of the site administrator, it might be interesting to run a query on how many users have a particular session in their wishlists, to see which are the most popular. The session's websafe key would be needed. After obtaining the key, the code for such a query would look like this:

wssk = websafeSessionKey

q = Wishlist.query().
filter(Wishlist.sessionKeys == wssk)

return len(q)

The main problem with a query to get all non-workshop pre-7pm sessions is that it implies filters based on inequalities of more than one property, typeOfSession and starttime. To get around this, multiple == statements can be combined with ORs like so to specify all non-workshop sessions:

q = Session.query(ndb.OR(Session.typeOfSession == 'lecture',
Session.typeOfSession == 'signing')).
filter(Session.starttime<'19:00')

As an alternative method, the query could only specify the time inequality, and afterwards a loop could be made to add the sessions from the query that have the typeOfSession != 'workshop' to a new list:

q = Session.query().
filter(Session.starttime<'19:00')

newq = []

for sess in q: if sess.typeOfSession != 'workshop': newq.append(sess)

When a new conference session is added, if that conference has a speaker, a Task will be added to the queue that adds a memcache entry for that conference specifying that speaker as the "Featured Speaker" and all of his/her sessions, if they are speaking more than once at that conference.

The key for the memcache entry is defined by the websafeConferenceKey since different conferences could have different Featured Speakers. A delay was put in the task because the recently added session wasn't being saved in the datastore fast enough to be retrieved when adding the list of sessions to the memcache entry.

The getFeaturedSpeaker function takes a websafeConferenceKey and returns that conference's Featured Speaker (if one exists).