This minor NarraFirma release adds one nice-to-have thing, but mostly fixes little bugs.
Hiding “not through the story” graphs
When I’m helping people work on catalysis, I often advise them to save time by ignoring graphs that don’t go “through the story.”
What does that mean? Well, say I asked people to share stories about a topic, and I also asked how old they are and where they live. This means that, among all the graphs generated by NarraFirma, there will be a graph of age versus location. That graph has nothing to do with the stories people told. Once in a while a graph like that will be useful, but not often. Not-through-the-stories graphs are worth a quick look, but I wouldn’t put a lot of time into considering them, since they are not why you did the project.
So I have added an option, on the “Configure catalysis report” page, to hide graphs that involve no questions about stories. You might find this option useless. However, if you happen to have a lot of questions about people, especially if you threw in a lot of demographic data you happened to have handy, hiding not-through-the-story graphs could save you some time.
Reset messes
When you reset a project, NF makes a backup copy in case you change your mind later. (We really don’t want you to lose your data.)
In the WordPress version of NF, I had recently (like a few years ago) found out that our scheme of adding the date to the backup table name was breaking the MySQL database, because MySQL table names have a character limit. So I changed NF so the backups just put a “b” in place of the “j” (for journal) that was usually in the name.
When I did this, I had assumed that the “rename” MySQL command would overwrite any existing table with the same name. It doesn’t. It throws up an error. So if you happened to reset the same project twice, NF would refuse to do it.
I have now changed this so that any NF reset backup table – for any project in your NF installation – is called
[your WordPress prefix]narrafirma_reset_backup_[date/time]
So in the unlikely event that you need to recreate a NF project from a reset backup, you will need to find the table by its date, not by the project name. Since (as far as I know) this has never actually happened, I think it is acceptable to remove the project name from the table name to make space for the date and time.
Note that the date/time in the table name is in UTC, not your local time zone.
No both/and
People never use software the way its developers think people will use it.
Funny story: One of the first pieces of software I wrote for money was a database system for a former professor. He told me what he wanted, and I built it. Then we met so he could look at what I had built. He sat down at the computer, put his hands on the keyboard, and somehow accidentally typed – in perfect sequence – the three keys that would immediately exit the entire database system. He said, “I broke it!” and I think my mouth dropped open. Anyway, after that, I added a special prompt to make sure the system would ask the user if they really did want to exit the system, just in case that ever happened again (though it probably never did).
NarraFirma has more users than ever, and they keep doing things I never do. Recently a user typed in a question short name with a forward slash in it, something like “Preference/choice.” It seems obvious – now – that people might do that, but I never thought of it before. The problem is that it creates a conflict.
The NF module that looks things up, the “valuePathResolver,” uses a forward slash to separate data identifiers in a lookup sequence. For example, when you are on the “Configure catalysis report” page, and you click on a type of graph to show, the code for that page saves your choice with the “valuePath”
/clientState/catalysisReportIdentifier/graphTypesToCreate
Meaning: ask the “clientState” module (which remembers what’s going on in your browser client) what the currently selected catalysis report is. Then save your choice in that report under the field name “graphTypesToCreate.” That’s why you can see the same types of graphs when you come back to the “Explore patterns” page again, even if you closed your browser in between.
The surveying code does not use the valuePathResolver, so a question with a slash-containing short name does not cause any data to be lost. But the table widgets throughout NF can’t find the data. They all use the valuePathResolver, and it chokes on the slash. (It thinks the question name must be the first part of the name, before the slash.)
I decided not to change how the valuePathResolver works, at least not yet. I didn’t write it, and it’s used all over the system, and I don’t want to create any new bugs. Instead, I wrote an extra validation step. You can no longer include a forward slash in any short name identifier. It’s not a beautiful solution, but it should fix the problem. If we ever get enough time to transition the badly-designed short-name-identifier system into a more robust all-UUID-identifier system, this conflict will go away.
As I told the user who discovered and then helped me track down this problem – and I want to say a huge thank you to that user – the “price” of free software is that its users and its testers are the same people. I would love to hire a dedicated tester to find other conflicts like this, but I don’t think anybody would work on it for the same salary I’m getting (nothing). So there will continue to be surprises like this – hopefully fewer and fewer as we go.
Clearer import & export
While I was messing with the Reset functionality, I decided I hated the Project admin / Import & export page, so I cleared it up a little.
Smaller bugs
I also fixed a few more bugs that were reported by users (or that I happened to notice while fixing other things).
- In the CSV import process, there was a bug while reading the specification for a scale question in which the “Does not apply” label was being ignored.
- Also in the CSV import process, you might have seen a browser error if one of the headers in your story-collection CSV file was not what NF was expecting to see. I’ve now moved that error message to its proper place in your “check import” readout in the browser console.
- The HTML page title for printed story cards was an ugly long UUID instead of the project name.
As always, if you find any bugs – or find anything in NF confusing or hard to use – please tell me on the GitHub issues page.