5. November 2016

This month I made a major change to the database in the form of changing the encoding to be compatible with Unicode's supplementary multilingual planes (i.e. converting the encoding to utf8mb4, or 4-byte compatible utf8). This allows for a much greater variety of characters and symbols.

I also did the preliminary development of a new editing interface in the JQuery Mobile (JQM) framework (rather than the home-made Skaldic Project framework that forms previously have been restricted to). This is not a simple task!

The new interface uses JQM form fields and highly minimalist information sent back to server — basically only fields changed are sent back to the server.

The new code:

• Processes field types (text, textarea, html, radio group, checkbox group, boolean/checkbox, popup menu, ajax link field)
• Generates three types of form: single row forms, multiple row subforms, and table forms
• Creates a new method for linking data between tables using ajax and the listview widget in JQM. This has interactive buttons for clearing, viewing and editing the linked data.
• Implements full update, delete and duplicate/insert functions in the old forms, along with full logging and archiving of changes, and delete undo
• Implements other features from the original desktop forms interface including: paging of forms with large numbers of values, drag-and-drop sorting of rows within a form. In addition it also adds a feature for wrapping table rows where they are too wide for the device.

Various problems with passing and processing data have been debugged, but a number of form field types are not implemented (esp. more complex ajax types, images, files and maps).

Other changes to interface:

• Added logging of anonymous hits to db (with minimal integer columns) for both interfaces
• Added a generic system for ajax popups and implemented those for bibliographic references and some other areas. Hopefully will reduce the load on the server. Also for iframe popups such as popup forms within forms.

I also created a new lemmatisation form in the new interface. This requires fewer updates because of ajax lookups, and has more information in ajax popups. Likewise, I also adapted the lexical variants form for the new interface with a simpler layout and information closer at hand thanks to ajax popups, and lookups for lemmas (previously if nothing was matched for a variant when the form loaded, then lemmatising would have to be done separately).

Screen shot of lemmatising form

Screen shot of lexical variants form

Progress of lexicon (28 Nov.)

• Lemmatised up to Merl I 62
• Lexical variants up to ESkál Vell 22

References