Weekly Report: 2nd December 2019

FrontierNav

Data-driven Sidebars

Previously FrontierNav's sidebars were hard-coded React components that grabbed data and displayed them in various ways. Over time, the layout of these sidebars gradually converged into some simple components as patterns and similarities emerged across the various datasets.

I briefly mentioned the data migration I did last week, I didn't have much to say about it but it enabled me to finally take the steps to generate layouts using just the data. No coding necessary.

Astral Chain was the first game I migrated to this approach since it's a fairly recent addition. Pokemon Sun/Moon was the next since there wasn't a lot of data.

The two hard ones are Xenoblade 2 and Xenoblade X. There's a lot more data, but more importantly, they make use of some custom components that are difficult to standardise. For example, Xenoblade X lets you choose Probes for its Probe Simulation using the Sidebar. Both have a range of custom styling to better match their games.

Of course, all of these edge cases can wait as they're not needed for most games. This comes back to my main goal: to fully document Lufia II purely through the web client to prove that FrontierNav's data editing features are viable.

Other Changes

• Support reordering properties
• Support renaming properties
• Support renaming entity types.
• Colours. Lots of colours.
• Each Entity Type now has a random color assigned which can be changed.
• Introduced Universal Entity Type indicator to know when something is an Entity Type.
• Introduced Universal Entity indicator to know when something is an Entity.
• Table column headings now have context menus for quick edits.
• Data validation on export.
  • This is mainly to ensure I didn't miss any edge cases when changing things.
• Redesigned modal dialogs to be less... in your face.

Browsers & Local Storage

Browsers come with ways to persist data locally using Local Storage, IndexedDB and other APIs. I've always been reluctant to use these features as most browsers tend to treat them as disposable. I can't have users making hundreds of changes stored locally and expect it to stay there. Things can go wrong.

Firefox 71 for example has broken local storage, at least the Fedora build of it. FrontierNav's authentication details are stored locally to persist logins. That doesn't work now on that browser, so users get logged out whenever they load the page. Even LastPass doesn't let me login, so I'm stuck using my phone to get passwords. I could rollback, but then I lose security updates which are more critical. I just have to wait for the patch to be release. The situation sucks.

Thanks for reading.