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Welcome to the working_landscapes wiki! Here we're going to document information about for maintaining and updating this application going forward. If you notice something specific that needs changing, please open up a GitHub issue instead of including it here.

Application Structure

The application has these main components:

There is an Active Admin control panel for editing data such as properties and the sites within those properties. This is for data we expect to add to often but not edit often. It is also information we feel has a structure that is unlikely to change.

There is a dynamic form that allows users to define which form fields needed for survey protocols. This part of the application relies heavily on Formbuilder. We expect protocols won't change much once defined -- that significant edits mean a new protocol with those edits should be created. We've seen that protocols define how to take a sample and what information is entered in each sample. Aside from the idea of samples and entries, it's hard to predict how new protocols will be structured, so we went with a dynamic way to construct them.

This survey protocol definition is then used to build the forms for samples and their entries (using Simple Form and Reform) that can be used to input data. Since we can't predict now which protocols will be used in the future for samples and entries, the information entered in as samples and entries is then stored in an HSTORE column in the database.

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For more information about how the data is structured in this application, see the Data Relationships page in this wiki.