Hey, JSON, WTF?

Ok, figured out the annoying JSON bug I was having yesterday. . . thanks to my use of virtual properties to traverse the model relationships and produce the json - my sub-arrays were getting double-JSON encoded. So instead of:


{name:'test node',
id: 234323,
type: 'decision'
transitions: [
{to_id: 432343, arrival:"top", departure:"left"},
{to_id: 343233, arrival:"right", departure:"bottom"}
]
}

I was getting:

{name:'test node',
id: 234323,
type: 'decision'
transitions: [
"{to_id: 432343, arrival:\"top\", departure:\"left\"},"
"{to_id: 343233, arrival:\"right\", departure:\"bottom\"}"
]
}


Notice the difference? Neither did I.

I actually got a number of items off of my list today. One of them, "Multiple hotspot/dragpoints per node" means that creating a transition between two nodes is more than defining a "from" and a "to". . . You might want to connect the bottom of one node to the left side of the other. Of course there's no functional difference, but users would become annoyed and diagrams messy without this kind of control. jQuery and my caveman-level CSS knowledge made it pretty trivial to dynamically add to each node, North, South, East, and West drag zones and drop zones. Now why am i calling them top, bottom, left, and right in the code? North, South, East and West sounds so much cooler. I wish i had thought of this earlier. Perhaps we can save these changes and promote version 2.0 with "Improved Variable Names! Upgrade Now!" or "Code base features even more consistent indentation!"

It hit me (while taking a power drill to my laptop (in order to justify an upgrade to the MacBook Air (Thanks Jared!) ) ) that users of our system will need to be able to select transitions. Up to this point, transitions have been a purely visual thing, simply reacting to the location and size of their related nodes. Selecting could be complex being that 1) nobody wants to try to click on a line that's curvy and only 2 pixels wide. While it is possible to detect whether or not the click was along the curve, this type of user experience is likely to make all the Davie recipients weep. 2) these Canvas elements (1 per curve, remember) overlap each other like the f'endas on a waitress - so the highest z-index canvas steals all the clicks. I quickly IM'ed Nitram to see if he had any ideas. He said, "how about a circle in the middle of each transition? -And you click it"
"Well Mr. Smarty-Pants, How's it feel to always have things like 'Answers' and 'Ideas'? I hope that works out for you!" So, i took his weak stump of an idea and reworked it tirelessly and I came up with this: Each transition will have a circle in the middle of it. And you can click it. This action will bring up the properties for that transition. This didn't solve the overlapping canvas problem - so what i've done is this: Mid-points for all transitions are determined and mapped to absolute page coordinates. Clickable DIVs are placed at these locations at the highest z-index. Seems to work so far. I can't wait to put a real skin on this thing. I hope i have time for that.

Unfortunately, each line I strike off, has me adding a line or two. My list currently looks like this. it may not make sense to you but, i mean, its MY list.

build/integrate graphics
finish: make transitions selectable/visually selected
finish: building property editing
finish: saving nodes.
panning / zoom
add more quality
self-transitioning nodes.
stop scratching it

Ok. I've gotta go, my laptop still works.

PS - I inadvertently got "fancy" tonight and ate a green curry w/ chicken out of a real coconut @ a local restaurant tonight. It wasn't what I ordered, but its what they brought me and what i had to pay for.