Review reports code / functionality

[orenyk]

Inspired by an e-mail from BMEC - the reports functionality is buggy (as an example it looks like the "Returned On Time" column isn't being calculated correctly), so we should review the code as it exists and potentially rewrite it to be more useful. We should also contact our current clients and find out who's using the functionality and how. This would ideally happen pre-export but isn't blocking.

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Original e-mail:

Hey Devs!

Any idea why the "Report" function is returning a bunch of "zeros" for the fields on the report page?

The numbers in the rest of the fields don't add up to the "total," and it's unclear which categories overlap. I'm trying to get statistics for the iPads, specifically.

Thanks!

My response:

Hi Chris, you can get more detailed statistics for a given equipment model (e.g. here [link to /reports/:id/for_model]); I'm not 100% sure how the reports functionality was set up so it's not immediately clear what fields overlap. Here's what I've figured out thus far: total includes all reservations that start and end within the given time period. For some reason it looks like Returned On Time isn't being calculated correctly (for example, [USER] returned an iPad on 09/16/2014 which was included in Total but doesn't appear in that column).

[Something I've noticed looking at that user is that he's been chaining iPad reservations continuously; I don't know if this is something you intended but he's been creating new reservations every time he returns a previous reservation.]

It seems like the whole reports functionality needs to be looked over; I'd trust the Totals and Checked Out numbers, probably, but everything else is a bit fuzzy. We'll try to look at this at some point but I don't think we'll be updating it on your end any time soon since we have a lot of other stuff on our plate to try and get the app ready for the world beyond Yale :-). Let me know if that helps, thanks!

[mnquintana]

If I remember right, reports are built from a series of custom data structures - pretty nice, but since almost no one in the Dev program knows how to do Structs in Ruby no one's touched it since 2012.

@dgoerger

[dgoerger]

Nick Wang coded this single-handedly in 2012 and I have no idea how it works. I told Chris at BMEC that I think his clicking on it was the first time anyone had ever tried it on a production instance, given that earlier this summer iirc we found the views to be borked and no-one had noticed in many months. He told me he'd just thought he'd try it out and see if he could see some useful or interesting metrics.

[orenyk]

I think over the summer we found some borked log views, but that was new functionality. As far as I can tell the reports views are fine, but some of the underlying logic seems to be funky. This will probably sit on the back burner for now but we should go over this code before or shortly after it's more widely publicized.