CS373 Spring 2021: William Wang

What did you do this week?

This week, I worked on both the backend and frontend of our IDB project to implement the search functionality. Frontend-wise, I added a sitewide search bar to the top of our home page using react-bootstrap. I also designed a sitewide search result page that would display all different kinds of models at once, at least the ones that matched the search query. For the backend, I designed a generic search/filter/sort transformation that would work on all our models, as long as we provided the appropriate criteria for each model. This allowed me to quickly put together the logic for use in our API.

What’s in your way?

I’m still having some trouble with the SQLAlchemy ORM when it comes to doing more complex queries. I know exactly how to write the plain SQL queries to do what I want, but expressing them in SQLAlchemy language is really difficult for me. At this point, I’m considering just writing out the raw text-based queries (which SQLAlchemy supports), but I still want to use the ORM if I can.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I plan to finish up the aforementioned tasks I’ve been working on so far. I also want to take some time to review regular expressions. I’ve been learning about and using them on and off for at least a few years, but every time I still…