Covid-Trail

The Team

For this project there was a group of 5 of us including me who came together to work on it.

• Jake
• Tsz
• Justin
• Clyde

The Goal

Our goal was to create to Covid checkin and vaccination application, similar to the popular University of Hawaii Manoa’s Lumisight. For our application we also wanted to try to use a different framework than the one we used in our Software Engineering Final Project. So, for this project we used Material UI as our Framework of choice instead of Semantic UI. Material UI was chosen as none of the group members had any prior use with this framework. Additionally, Material UI is known for being able to create well polished and sleek dropdowns and menus. However, we only got explore this functionality slightly as the time to complete the project was rather short.

The Difficulties

• Using Material UI
• Using a WebAPI to allow Users to Upload files
• Creating Pages

My Solutions

For this project I was tasked with a few key pieces of the project. However, groups first hurdle to overcome was getting used Material UI. This ended up being a larger hurdle than we initialled thought it was going to be. One rather annoying aspect about Material UI and the way we chose to style the pages was that prior to the page being rendered you use the UseStyles function that gets passed into the page. This effectively means you need to write a whole CSS page for each page. This has an added headache of making the long scroll past the CSS to get to the actual pages content.

To increase the functionality of our application we wanted to allow for users to upload images of their vaccination card to the site. To do this we used Cloudinary. Cloudinary in of itself was rather easy to use, the required functions that needed to be called were quite tricky. In particular the cloudinary.createUploadWidget() was rather difficult to setup. Not in the getting the window to display but in the returning of the URL to the application and then storing it in MongoDB.

Another task of mine was to design the home page as well as the submit vaccination information page. The home page was rather simple but informative acting more like a guide post on what the application is and how to use it. With the submit Vaccination page being a simple form allowing the users to input their vaccination information.

If you are interested in how to use our application see the guide. It goes over all the key functionality in the application.

What I learned

What I took away from this project is that time management will always be difficult in groups. Weather that be waiting on someone to construct a collection before you can store stuff, or waiting on someone to make a page so you can style it and test its functionality. It will always be a group effort

Here is a link to the repo if you want to check it out for yourself CovidTrail!