Team:Heidelberg/Templates/NRPS-W-17

From 2013.igem.org

Monomer selection page aesthetic improvements

This week we focused on improving the aesthetics of the NRP selection page. Most of the page layout was shuffled around, so that everything important (Monomer selection, buttons, peptide graphic) fit onto a laptop screen and no scrolling around is necessary. For this we also removed the help text, which added a lot of bloat to the page. We'll try to find a fancier way to document things and help the user later on. We also used a nice feature of s[http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2/ select2], which basically allows you to determine how the dropdown selection options are styled. More specifically, each monomer is displayed together with its 2d structure as generated by the OpenBabel script we had already written.

AJAX functionality

In order to facilitate the communication of the web interface with the C++ code, we started testing the AJAX functionality. One thing we noticed was that the (otherwise great) Dajaxice library, can actually cause problems due to relative URLs, as it does not correctly utilize the wsgi settings. This was especially problematic, as the development and production environments differed, so that a very ugly hack would have to be written for this to work. Instead, we decided to use a more barebones/standard AJAX implementation by actually using jQuery. A test was written with the monomer selection being passed via AJAX and then a popup alert (yay!) which produced an XML out of this selection. This XML could be passed into the C++ function.