Going through the course material for ActiveRecord and Sinatra, I was actually really excited to start building my Sinatra project. I was even looking forward to working with HTML and CSS from the MVC apps we were building in our labs. What I did not expect was ideation to take the longest to work through. For some reason, I just could not think of an original project concept. My cohort shared their project ideas and even other Flatiron student project walkthroughs, and everytime I just thought, “whelp, there’s another idea I can’t do.” Granted, I was not dedicating enough time to thinking about my project, I was just focusing on trying to learn the material since project week happened to coincide with our move out/move in dates (have to exercise those work-life balance muscles sometime, right?) For future students who find themselves in the same boat: take a couple hours to just sit and jot down possible project ideas. I tried to come up with ones that I would like to use time and time again. So that’s how I ended up building a budgeting app with Sinatra.
The next hurdle I had to overcome was mapping out the relationships between my models. I knew a User would have many Budgets, but I also wanted to include a way for Users to see the purchases they made that were related to a Budget. Should a Purchase be an attribute of a Budget or its own separate class? Ultimately, I decided to make a third, separate Purchase class that had its own attributes, such as a :date since I knew I wanted to list the Purchases by their :date for each Budget. I settled on these relationships:
- A User has many Budgets
- A Budget has many Purchases
- A Purchase belongs to a Budget
therefore…
- A User has many Purchases through Budgets
Then came the input validation trials. Budget amounts and Purchase amounts would be floating-point types. Luckily, with a little Googling, input types can be numbers!
<input type="number" step="any" name="amount" id="purchase_amount" required>
I did have to refactor the step attribute to any, otherwise the input field defaults to only accepting integers.
Even though I made the input fields required, I came to discover that users were able to get around this by using whitespace " " as their input, specifically in the :name input fields. Since this was purely a UX issue, I wasn’t too strict on what Users could name their Budgets.
<input type="text" name="name" id="budget_name" pattern="[^\s][a-zA-Z0-9\s]+"></input>
This would at least prevent users from using purely whitespace as a name.
Using shotgun to see the product of your code coming together really made working through the error messages worth it. I keep hearing about Rails and all the cool things that come with it, so I am already looking forward to the next project!