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I stopped working on the Osm Admin project, for financial reasons. Did it hurt? A lot. Was it necessary? Unfortunately, yes. This post is a short retrospection on this matter.

Before diving into what should be in the docs, let's define what you should more or less know before using Osm Admin.

There are four types of people who will read the docs: power users, developers, vendors and contributors.

Here are my thoughts on product backlog and roadmap.

Yesterday, I tested the instructions for installing Osm Admin locally as a contributor.

Yesterday:

• Osm Admin in-browser functionality was fully restored after creating search index in the indexer.
• All test suites started passing again, and being run automatically on git push.

Yesterday started as usual, planning new iteration, and then BAM! - one folk - Saif - joined the project. It made me correct the course a bit, and take care of potential contributors:

• README explains what the project is about, and how to get started as a contributor;
• I'm fixing things to make the project actually runnable just after installing it.

Yay! After implementing invalid data conversion, I finished the iteration #18 dedicated to diff-based migrations!

I must say, it's a bit disturbing to implement the same thing for the third time. Still, the goal is to get it finished, and have it sustainable.

After the effort, the code has become su much easier to read!

I continued working on property diff algorithm that plans all the migration details.

Yesterday, I finished implementing data conversion for int and string property types.

Then, I started refactoring it.

Last time, I pushed through string property migrations and created a migration log.

Today, I continued solving data conversion issues.

• I finished implementing string property migrations.
• Migrations have got a meaningful log explaining what migrations take place, and why.
• Along the way, I fixed numerous issues.

Yesterday, I finished writing int property migrations. True, testing it is still a todo.

The major part of the code (type change, nullability and other attribute handling) will be reused in other property types.

I refactored Property::migrate() using additional Migration classes. It's so much more convenient to compare property definition versions and generate migration SQLs!

New code structure already handles property explicitness changes.

After enumerating what kind of changes can happen to a property, I started implementing the most hard one - changing property type.

The Query::bulkUpdate() method is implemented in the TDD way.

In Osm Admin, I've finished indexing. It means that whenever you modify an object in the database, the changes are automatically propagated to all dependent indexed properties in the database.

I've also introduced a grid/form pair as the main user interface concept that is optimized for performing operations on multiple objects. There is also a programming interface (API) that will internally work in the same way, but without visuals. I implemented a part of this interface - an object creation form.

Osm Framework and all projects built with it - including this website and Osm Admin - are upgraded to TailwindCSS 3.0.

Today, I finished implementing an object creation form.

It works according to the specs on Interfaces and Forms. Currently, it only supports string and integer input fields; later, there will be a lot more.

Let's review how it works.

In Osm Admin, a form is an integral part of the class user interface. It's a very specific kind of HTML form.

In this article, I'll review what's in a class form, and how it's reflected from the application code.

Yesterday, I described a user interface pattern for managing data of a certain data class using a grid/form pair. Let's call this grid/form pair class interface in the admin area.

In this article, I'll examine what moving parts are inside a class interface.

So far, I've been concerned about how application data is modeled, stored and handled internally.

Yet, the final objective a user interface for viewing and editing it visually.

Let's dream a bit about how it might look like.

Yay, indexing works!

It's changed quite a bit, so let's review how it works from the very beginning.

For the last two weeks, I figured out two core features that will allow Osm Admin to stand out from other CRUD applications:

1. It will allow mass editing of data objects.
2. It will automatically propagate data changes throughout the database.

The foundation for the mass editing feature is data queries. Data propagation will be ensured via indexing.

I've been working on the Osm Admin indexing engine, and it's still in progress. While working on it, I reworked the inner working of data queries. Finally, I've achieved a very clear separation of various Osm Admin concerns, and documented it.

In Osm Core, I added reflection over class methods.

I'm still working on indexing, and it seems to get one more refactoring. But more on that later.

Meanwhile, let's review Osm Admin modules, their responsibilities and dependencies.

After 3 days of intensive work, I've got dot syntax working!

Along the way, I refactored the query internals once again, which reminds me a heuristics saying that you've got to implement something three times to get it right :)

New query implementation uses the concept of formulas - SQL-like expressions used for selecting, filtering and sorting data. Currently, formulas are quite limited, but with time, they should be a really powerful feature.

I decided to support selecting, filtering and ordering by properties of a related object using dot syntax: product.price, parent.level. This syntax will automatically join the table that stored related objects.

I realized that implementing joins requires a better query model than my current naive wrapper around Laravel query. This article describes the new query model.

This article is about running SELECT and INSERT queries on data objects stored in the database.

In short, use the query() function. It runs on top of Laravel Query\Builder. It handles the mapping of data class properties onto table columns, and initiates the computation of indexed properties.

Currently, you can only SELECT and INSERT, other operations are coming soon.

Today, I implemented computation of indexed properties during insert. The implementation dictated some changes in indexed property definitions compare to the initial design, and how indexers are reflected into the data schema.

Also, I implemented a table query class working on the top of Laravel Query\Builder. More about it next time, for now I'll review how indexed properties are computed during INSERT operation.

I had two weeks full of meaningful, productive work. I started with sketching Osm Admin grid and form pages, and implemented a very basic, but working home page, and success/error messages. To enable that, Osm Framework now have extensible Blade templates, and a nice JavaScript solution for capturing user input into a modal dialog box, or into some picker component.

Then, I undertook a major refactoring of Osm Admin, including moving lots of pieces of code to their new places, stabilizing the underlying object model, rewriting database migrations and sketching future effort on data indexing. During this effort, I implemented generic object hydration and reflection over named subtypes.

I've already shared most of this information on Twitter, so if you are reading this, consider following me on Twitter and getting daily updates.

It's often needed to compute, or index, data in database tables based on data in other tables.

This article is the first sketch of a consistent indexing solution.

I've finished refactoring how Osm Admin stores data objects in the database. Also, in order to support multi-website, multi-vendor, multi-language applications, I've introduced the concept of scopes.

Most reasoning from the first version is still valid, so let's take a fresh look of what's changed.

I developed dehydrate()/hydrate() functions for a very practical need - storing the data class schema:

• in cache - to reduce processing time spent on reflection;
• and in database - to compare current and new database schema, and only add new tables and columns.

This article describes the information stored in the schema, and unit tests that I prepared in order to be sure that schema classes are property hydrated.

I had two very productive weeks. #buildinpublic works wonders.

Most effort went into my new project, Osm Admin. I sketched how data classes look like, generated database tables from class attributes, and started working on the Admin UI. It's very fulfilling to see how an abstract idea gains shape.

As described in Migrations, most data objects of the same class will be stored in a database table.

But what about subclasses? In an e-commerce application, bags, dresses, and digital products, collectively known as subclasses, are all products stored in products table, and they may have bad-specific, dress-specific or digital product specific properties that should also be stored there.

This article describes how subclasses are defined and stored in Osm Admin.

Different data classes have repeating structural patterns. For example, most data classes stored in database tables have the auto-incremented id property. Use PHP traits to effectively introduce the same properties to different data classes over and over again.

I partly implemented data schema migration. It takes data class definitions, and incrementally creates or alters underlying database tables.

The article below describes how schema migration works, and what's not implemented yet, but most probably will be.

Note. This topic is continued in the new article.

This website got a completely new look. There are new blog posts diving into core Osm Framework features. Osm Framework itself offers more convenient page layout, website-wide header, footer and <head>, customizable error pages. The themes support theme-specific CSS styles and JS scripts not bound to any module. New projects come with a handy bin/install.sh script that simplifies installation on Linux. From now on, run osmh without any parameters.

From now on, this website is deployed on push, and by the way, you can easily play with the website copy locally. In the Osm framework, new Osm_Project application allows reflecting over modules and classes regardless to which application they belong. New experimental project is aimed at quick creation of the Admin UI.

Osm Framework introduced production mode and maintenance mode. osm.software website went live.

Osm Framework introduced JS controllers, and JS unit tests. osmcommerce.com website project was renamed to osm.software, it finalized the post rendering, and introduced a tool for checking broken links.