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State of the union

The purpose of this document is to give anyone who reads it a quick overview of both the current state and the direction of the code. The community should try and update this document as the code evolves.

How we got here

  • App originally built in Java for Android 1.0/T-Mobile G1
  • Written at Google by graduate student interns and then University of Washington
  • Designed as a survey application backed by JavaRosa (which deals with XForm forms) communicating with OpenRosa servers
  • Many different contributors/styles/eras over 10 year lifetime
  • App wasn't built with a TDD workflow or with automated testing
  • Lots of work in the last two years to add more tests and clean up code using coverage measurement and static checks

Where we are now

  • App has mixture of unit tests (JUnit), Robolectric tests (Junit + Robolectric) and Espresso tests but coverage is far from complete
  • Test style, reasoning and layering is inconsistent
  • App still written in Java with min API at 16 so basically targeting Java 7 source
  • UI is "iconic" (old) but with a lot of inconsistencies and quirks and is best adapted to small screens
  • A lot of code lives in between one "god" Activity (FormEntryActivity) and a process singleton (FormController)
  • Core form entry flow uses custom side-to-side swipe view (in FormEntryActivity made up of ODKView)
  • Questions are rendered using a view "framework" of implementations inheriting from QuestionWidget
  • Async/reactivity handled with a mixture of callbacks, LiveData and Rx
  • App stores data in flat files indexed in SQLite
  • Access to data in SQLite is done inconsistently through a mix of provider, helper and DAO objects
  • Raw access to database rows is favored over the use of domain objects
  • Preferences for the app use Android's Preferences abstraction (for UI also)
  • Material Components styles are used in some places but app still uses AppCompat theme
  • Dagger is used to inject "black box" objects such as Activity and in some other places but isn't set up in a particularly advanced way
  • Http is handled using OkHttp3 and https client abstractions are generally wrapped in Android's AsyncTask (and some Rx)
  • Geo activities use three engines (Mapbox, osmdroid, Google Maps) depending on the selected basemap even though Mapbox could do everything osmdroid does
  • Code goes through static analysis using CheckStyle, PMD, SpotBugs and Android Lint
  • Code is mostly organized into packages based around what kind of object they are which has become unwieldy
  • The @Deprecated annotation (with a comment) is being used to track technical debt in the code

Where we're going

  • Trying to adopt Material Design's language to make design decisions and conversations easier in the absence of designers and to make the UI more consistent for enumerators (“Typography rework” discussion)
  • Moving non UI testing away from Espresso to cut down on long test startup times
  • Slowly moving responsibilities out of FormEntryActivity
  • Talk of moving to Kotlin but not real plans as of yet (“Using Kotlin for ODK Android apps” discussion)
  • General effort to increase test coverage and quality while working on anything and pushing more for tests in PR review
  • Trying to remove technical debt flagged with @Deprecated
  • Favoring domain objects (instance, form) with related logic where possible to more explicitly link data and logic
  • Moving code to packages based on domain slices (audio or formentry for instance) to make it easier to work on isolated features and navigate code
  • Refactoring towards an OpenRosa abstraction (OpenRosaAPIClient) closer to its documented API and takes care of all interactions with Aggregate, Central etc (currently some high level work interacts with OpenRosaHttpInterface directly)
  • QuestionWiget implementations are moving from defining their "answer" view programmatically to implementing onCreateAnswerView