June 27th call with Roger And this week's updates

This week I've been upto creating a module and making it deployable using the maven archetype.Well that may sound pretty simple, actually it is. The maven archetype is like a wizard for creating the openmrs module and that's great, as we dont need to spend much time on learning how to create a module and stuff, which might usually take a lot of time. But still there are a few things a developer has to know to create his own module such as the required tag in config file, dependencies in pom.xml , the manage controller, the activator class etc.

Then i went into some digging on the reporting module as it would be of key importance in our module. I've been trying to debug the module and understand the workflow so that i can incorporate it in our module.

Now, coming to our call, Roger corrected me in the flow i was going to follow and gave me pointers which made me understand how it is to be done. Then he gave me guidance over the module's progress and what he is expecting.

I would shortly upload my code on github, then Roger and others can see the state of the project and can analyze the code and provide their valuable suggestions. Hopefully this module's 1.0 version would be usable by the end of the summer :-)

June 20th Call with Roger

This was more of a status update call where i updated roger of what i have been doing and what difficulties i have been facing.

I started working on reporting module and getting to know all the jargon related to it , and those are dimensions,indicators, cohort queries to name a few. They are very interesting and i am intrigued by how much thought process must have happened to bring this reporting module to fruition. I still am struggling with getting the disaggregated data which is key to create our module. We still need to make progress on how to achieve that.

Roger helped me with understanding what exactly disaggregations meant and suggested that i contact someone who are working on reporting for a long time. He also told me to start working on creating a basic module using maven archetype which consume's report schema.

So my further goals would be working on that module.

More details can be found at the project page :https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/projects/OpenMRS-DHIS2-SDMX-HD+integration+Proposed+Project+Plan

Week-3 Call with Roger

Roger Explained what must be done ahead and how i should be moving forward.

The discussion was mainly focused on what i know and that was basically just a little functioning of dhis2 as i had it installed in my system. And also on what i must know before starting on the project coding, so i need to be working on reporting module's code and as this project is closely related to the reporting module.
That's all for now:-)

Week-2 call with Roger Friedman, Bob Jolliffe,Saptarshi Purkayastha and James M. Kariuki

Thank you so much  Bob Jolliffe,Saptarshi Purkayastha and James M. Kariuki for making this call happen.

This call had totally unexpected effect on me, till this call i had a basic idea of what is needed and what must be done. After this call my whole perspective of the project's idea has changed. Really speaking i didn't understand anything that was discussed in the call(James and Saptarshi were typing some important parts of the call to explain what was happening). But, Roger was so patient and had another follow up call instantly right after the main call and made me understand what i had to do and what was the essence of it. Roger almost sat for an hour later and gave me this following idea of the use case of our project.

https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/projects/OpenMRS-SDMX-HD-DHIS2+Integration+Use+Cases

Now i need to start with working on Dhis2 and understanding the whole functionality as i need to be integrating it closely with the reporting module.

If possible, we will be having another call to finalize the goals(most of this call will also be finalized by the mentors as i'm still a novice in this domain and their expertise is very important to decide the goals) which would follow up with my update of a finalized project plan.

Great learning week ahead!! :-)

Gsoc Week-1 Call with Roger

In this week's call,I and Roger discussed about the tentative goals of the project. They are

-Extending reporting module's tables to persist the requested report's data for this project.

-Understanding the present SDMX integration project and implementing it to the present reporting module.(It is the required use case as per the present requirements)

-Designing the project's plan based on exact requirement of how the exact integration between the reporting and SDMX-HD(presently it is of creating a UI in reporting module to create the report int sdmx format and when the user select that specific option the message would be generated and would be forwarded using the messaging module).

-Possibly integrating the reporting module's rest services project(Currently a GSOC project)  with this module.

-Designing the Module's exact targets.

-Integration between DHIS2 and this module must be discussed.
More details can be viewed at the Project Wiki page.

There needs to be a lot of calls and i need to find out what exactly is the requirement to make our goals tangible so that coding can start from 17th without having any confusion.

Another great summer ahead with OpenMRS :-)

I had a great summer last year with OpenMRS, was selected for GSOC 2012-Dynamic Autocomplete and List Entry Widget and was able to complete the project's requirements.(The project is currently being integrated with the HTML Form Entry Module).It was the best learning experience i ever had in my undergraduate life. Till then i had coding knowledge but when i started working for OpenMRS it was not just   about contributing to the open source community, it was about writing code systematically, commenting the code,documenting the code, making the code implemented to be of use by creating tutorials for it, all this just about code. Now comes the mentoring and interaction of this specific community, they welcome you with great warmth, if you have any questions just open up the irc channel and ask it, however silly or complex your doubt is, it will be answered, if you have doubts about a specific module ping the module creator,yes they might be a little late in responding but they will respond,  if you still feel they are not taking your request seriously you can ask it in the mailing list. I learnt loads of other things as well such as mailing etiquette, importance of having calls, having my code reviewed, testing and writing my own JUnit test cases for the code i created, importance of following a framework model and the list goes on.... there are many others which i might have not mentioned. 
When i actually was selected for this project i had no idea of what i had to do next, it was a completely new  setting i had been exposed to,  i didn't know what was happening where and even eclipse was new to me, till then i wrote my code in an editor. My mentor Steven Githens is responsible for guiding me when i had so less knowledge of the system through completing the project successfully, he never made me feel pressurized even when i was behind the schedule, he always insisted that he wanted me to learn rather than worry about objectives and goals, i couldn't have asked for a better mentor!. Another great help was Darius Jazayeri, my backup mentor, if i had a doubt in anywhere,any module, i would ask Darius and i never got a no from him. It was like Darius knew everything! i couldn't help but notice an irc conversation which made me smile, where everyone were speculating whether Darius was a robot or a human. He got married last year at that time and still he responded promptly to each of my questions , great guy! Not only them, i had the opportunity to interact with others like Mark Goodrich, Ben Wolfe, Daniel Kayiwa,Saptarshi Purkayastha.

In short it was an experience that changed my life a lot and i thank everyone who is responsible for it.

This year again they have placed trust in me by giving me the project- Openmrs-SDMXHD-DHIS2 integration and my mentor this year is Roger Friedman and backup mentors are Saptarshi Purkayastha and Bob Jolliffe. Truthfully speaking even this time i really have no clear idea as to what needs to be done, but Roger started making me understand all the terms and what needs to be done. This time i guess i would be needing help of lots of people who are working in different modules as my project is the integration of those modules.I guess this year i'm going to make a lot of friends!:-).

I have to wait and see what else i have in store this summer. Thank you OpenMRS for selecting me once again this year!! 

Saludos!!(this i learnt from Roger ;-))