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Pranav edited this page Aug 18, 2023 · 5 revisions

Introduction

Before developing make sure you know how to use the app by reading the user guide first. It will make coding much easier. This guide will try to teach you about how the tool’s code works. It is a lot of information, so don’t worry if you can’t understand it in one go, the best way to understand how it works is to actually work on the code. A couple of pointers:

  • At the time of writing this handover document, it isn’t clear what every function does as there aren’t comments for everything.
  • As you work on the tool, always make sure that what you’ve written will make sense to other developers. This means writing docstrings/comments, and naming things properly.
  • If you think some information is important to future programmers, record it in this document. This way we can constantly improve documentation.

Setup

Electron

This app is built using electron, which essentially allows you to turn a website into a desktop application. This means that the app is built using HTML, CSS, and JS. You should have an intermediate understanding of these languages before starting.

Here are some JavaScript concepts you should be familiar with, as you'll be seeing them often in the code:

  • Asyncronous functions and Promises (async, await, .then, etc.)
  • Event handling
  • Object Oriented Programming (classes, properties)

Prerequisites/Installations

Refer here for a complete guide: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/tutorial-prerequisites

There are several tools you will need to install before you can get started. Note: you will most likely need to install the portable versions of node and git since we don't have admin privileges (you can google how to do this).

Building and Editing the code

Fork this repository, and clone your fork using a git client such as GitHub desktop (recommended) or the command line.

Open a terminal window in the folder of your repository and run npm install. If using VScode, you can use the built in terminal to do this. This command will install all dependencies.

To build the app, run npm start. After you make an edit, use ctrl+r to refresh the page. If you make an edit to files outside of the "renderer" folder, you may need to run rs and fully restart the app to see your changes.

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