Overview of RadGrad2's design
This chapter provides documentation on the design of RadGrad.
RadGrad is rather complex. We have decided to organize this chapter in a manner that parallels the directory organization of the radgrad2 respository. This has the following advantages:
If you are looking for documentation about a design aspect associated with a specific place in the source code, then it is likely to be found in this chapter at the same location.
Reading through this chapter is similar to a guided tour through the source code.
As you read through the sections, if there is no subsection corresponding to a subdirectory, then it is likely there is not yet any documentation available for those design elements.
However, there are design elements that are "cross-cutting" and do not fall neatly into a single subdirectory location. For example, tests are located both throughout the api/ directory hierarchy in addition to the top-level tests/ directory. So, we have a top-level chapter called "Testing" to cover this design concept. Other cross-cutting concerns are Reviews, Deployment, and Documentation, so we've elevated them to their own top-level chapters.
If you run into trouble trying to understand a feature of RadGrad, contact an experienced developer as this may indicate the need for additional documentation.
The radgrad2 repository
The RadGrad2 repository contains the source code for the RadGrad2 Meteor application, as well as a set of scripts used for data manipulation.
It is available at https://github.com/radgrad/radgrad2.
You will need to ask a RadGrad administrator for write permissions to this repository in order to start development. Note: we do not use the "fork and pull-request" model of development. Instead, all RadGrad developers commit directly to the radgrad2 repo. We use a "branch and merge" model of development called "Issue Driven Project Management". For details, please see the Tech Stack chapter.
Directory overview
The radgrad2 repository contains the following top-level directories:
.github/: contains issue and review templates, and the github actions to perform continuous integration.
app/: the Meteor application source code.
archive/: a kind of "Trash": a place for developers to stash files that they are pretty sure (but not completely sure) they will never need again. Occasionally we will garbage collect and delete files from this directory.
config/: contains settings files that are read in by the RadGrad Meteor application upon startup.
scripts/: contains scripts for retrieving data from STAR, converting data from RadGrad1 to RadGrad2, and so forth.
In many respects, the radgrad2 repository has a similar organization to meteor-application-template-react. If you are not already familiar with this system, it will be helpful to watch its screencasts.