I started writing this up, then sent a preview to a friend, and he was
like "oh cool, but also this is not correct?"
I didn't realize Dyeworks has limited-time support to be *able* to dye
certain items. Hey, glad we're writing this guide for people like me,
then! lol
I wonder if we can lean on Owls for this. It seems like they already
list "Permanent Dyeworks" for some items, I wonder if they say
something special for active limited-edition Dyeworks items!
We could do a whole thing about like, checking singular vs plural, but
I'd rather just keep it simpler; I think it's clear from context that
we're talking about a category, so plural is fine even if it's not
actually more than one.
Okay so, like 30 minutes ago I added fallback behavior for cases where
we can't correctly infer the color from a PB item's name… and then I
pulled it up in the color and found that, oh, right, there are already
3 PB items that *correctly* return `nil` for `Item#pb_color`: Aisha
Collar, Elephante Hat, and Ixi Collar.
This is because they're common items that apply to many colors, like
the basics, but also many other less-special or older color variants.
They are the most likely case where we'll return `nil`.
So, I've updated our fallback UI to, instead of talk vaguely about
missing data, just assume that we're dealing with basic items. In the
rare window of time where a new color is released, and we have PB items
for it but no manual color data yet, this can just incorrectly say
"Basic Colors" and that's fine.
Oh right, it's possible for `Item#pb?` to return true, but
`Item#pb_color` to return `nil`, if the item has the paintbrush item
description but we can't find a color whose name matches the item name.
This would be expected if a new color were added to Neopets, and PB
items for it were modeled by the community, but we hadn't manually
added the color to the database yet.
Previously, the Item Getting Guide would crash in this scenario. Now,
it correctly handles the possibility of a `nil` value for `pb_color`,
and shows some placeholder info.
To test this, I temporarily edited some item names to not contain the
color name anymore (e.g. "P-rate Elephante Shirt and Vest"), then
loaded the guide and made changes until it no longer crashed.
Oh oops, I added an optional `subtitle` argument for the item table
list row template, but didn't realize that it would crash in cases when
not provided! Now, we add an initializer to set it to `nil` if
undefined.
Note that there's a known performance issue here: we should try to
fetch all the OWLS values at once, instead of doing them in sequence
while rendering the page!
Now, for colors like Mutant or Magma where there's no paint brush
image to show, we use a sample pet image instead, to help it have equal
visual weight and clarity as the cases with the paint brushes.
We do some cleverness in here to make sure to always show the relevant
species, if possible!
Ohh yeah, this helps communicate the process much better, especially
for what the Shops/Trades links mean.
I think I'm gonna also go get the paint brush thumbnail images and add
them to the database too, to help better communicate that this is a
paint brush item situation.
Clearer focus states, row changes bg color on hover/focus to help you
track where you are, remove the redundant image thumbnail link from the
tab order (it's the same as the item name link!)
As part of this, I added a new `search_icon` helper, and a new
`button_link_to` helper, which both styles the link as a button and
accepts an `icon` parameter to make it easier to pass in an icon!
This helps us be more efficient with our use of space, keep the CTAs well
aligned, show a clear total, and set up how we might do CTAs for more complex
cases like all the potential Neopoint CTAs like Wiz/Trades/Auction/etc!
NC prices, some CSS, and also a new application-level helper that adds
a feature I've long wanted and been working around for Turbo: the
ability to specific that a stylesheet is specific to the current page,
and should be unloaded when removed!
I use this to write `sources.sass` without the usual
`body.items-sources` scoping that we've historically used to control
what pages a stylesheet applies to. (In the long past, this was because
a lot of stylesheets were—and still are–routed through the
`application.sass` stylesheet! But even for more recent standalone page
stylesheets, I've done the scoping, to avoid issues with styles leaking
beyond the page they're meant for when Turbo does a navigation.)
This'll affect the recommended acquisition method by a lot!
NC Mall info like current price isn't surfaced anywhere else in the app
right now. It'd probably be good to add to the item page, and maybe
some other places too!
TNT requested that we figure out ways to connect the dots between
people's intentions on DTI to their purchases in the NC Mall.
But rather than just slam ad links everywhere, our plan is to design an
actually useful feature about it: the "Item Getting Guide". It'll break
down items by how you can actually get them (NP economy, NC Mall,
retired NC, Dyeworks, etc), and we're planning some cute actions you
can take, like shortcuts for getting them onto trade wishlists or into
your NC Mall cart.
This is just a little demo version of the page, just breaking down
items specified in the URL into NC/NP/PB! Later we'll do more granular
breakdown than this, with more info and actions—and we'll also like,
link to it at all, which isn't the case yet! (The main way we expect
people to get here is by a "Get these items" button we'll add to the
outfit editor, but there might be other paths, too.)
First one, Turbo reasonably yelled at us in the JS console that we
should put its script tag in the `head` rather than the `body`, because
it re-executes scripts in the `body` and we don't want to spin up Turbo
multiple times!
I also removed some scripts that aren't relevant anymore, fixed a bug
in `outfits/new.js` where failing to load a donation pet would cause
the preview thing to not work when you type (I think this might've
already been an issue?), reworked `item_header.js` to just run once in
the `head`, and split scripts into `:javascripts` (run once in `head`)
vs `:javascripts_body` (run every page load in `body`).
Someone requested this in Discord, and I figured why not! I'm still
planning to move stuff away from Impress 2020 over time, I just figure
may as well have them more linked while this is still The Reality
This doesn't really matter, I just didn't realize the `.html` part was
optional, and I guess I omitted it here without realizing? But let's
add it for consistency.
I *think* what I'm observing is that:
1. The zone restrictions are different between these items.
2. The zone restrictions *change* when reloading the page sometimes. (I
assume from remodeling?)
3. The items look very buggy on many pets, because many appearances
seem to expect different zone restrictions than the item actually
has.
I think what this means is:
1. TNT has finally unbound restricted zones from the item level, and
allowed different appearances to have different restrictions. Neat!
2. The API still serves it the same way, as a field on the item.
So I think this means we need to update our schema to reflect the fact
that an item's `zones_restrict` field isn't *really* a property of the
item; it's a property of the combination of the item and the current
body ID.
My gut take here is that maybe this means it's time for the Large
Refactor that I've kinda been interested in for a while, but been
avoiding because of Impress 2020 compatibility issues: instead of a
`body_id` field on assets, and having them directly belong to items,
make an `ItemAppearance` record (closer to how 2020's GQL API modeled
it, I was looking ahead to this possibility!) that's keyed on item and
body ID, and assets belong to *that*.
Then, we could move the zones restriction field onto the
`ItemAppearance` record instead. And then it doesn't really matter to
us how TNT models it internally; whatever we saw is what we use.
(Again, I looked ahead to this in the 2020 app, and tried to use the
`restrictedZones` field on `ItemAppearance` when possible—even though
it secretly just reads directly from the `Item`!)
…but that's a pretty big departure from how things are modeled now, and
isn't something we can just throw together—especially coordinating it
across both apps. I was getting close to being able to shut off 2020
from a *front-facing* perspective (but still keeping a lot of the GQL
endpoints open for the wardrobe-2020 frontend), but I don't think we're
very close to being able to try to target turning off 2020's *backend*
as a prereq to this; or at least, if we do, we should expect that to
take a while. (Counting now, there's still 9 GQL queries—not as many as
I expected tbh, but still quite a few.)
So idk how to sequence this! But for now, let's put out a warning, and
start setting expectations.
Okay, so I still don't know why rendering is just so slow (though
migrating away from item translations did help!), but I can at least
cache entire closet lists as a basic measure.
That way, the first user to see the latest version of a closet list
will still need just as much time to load it… but *only* the ones that
have changed since last time (rather than always the full page), and
then subsequent users get to reuse it too!
Should help a lot for high-traffic lists, which incidentally are likely
to be the big ones belonging to highly active traders!
One big change we needed to make was to extract the `user-owns` and
`user-wants` classes (which we use for trade matches for *the user
viewing the list right now*) out of the cached HTML, and apply them
after with Javascript instead. I always dislike moving stuff to JS, but
the wins here seem. truly very very good, all things considered!
Impress 2020 has had this for a while, I've wanted it for reference on
occasion, let's bring it in!
Very similar logic, and Ruby & Rails's date affordances are super
helpful for simplifying how to express it!
Using good ol'-fashioned cookies! The JS sets it, and then Rails reads
it on pageload. That way, there's no flash of content for it to load in
after JS loads.
If your first wanted list was created before your first owned list,
then `false` would come before `true` in the keys of
`current_user_lists`.
I both fixed this to be more consistent at the model level, because who
likes unpredictable behavior? But also downstream at the view I
hardcoded that true should come before false, because that's a UI
concern that I want to be encoded in the view regardless of what's
upstream.
It was a bit tricky to figure out the right API for this, since I'm
looking ahead to the possibility of splitting these across multiple
pages with more detail, like we do in DTI 2020.
What I like about this API is that the caller gets to apply, or not
apply, whatever scopes they want to the underlying hanger set (like
`includes` or `order`), without violating the usual syntax by e.g.
passing it as a parameter to a method.
I guess I deleted this a while ago without really noticing… I think I'd
at some point like to replace this with like, the DTI 2020 improved
table layout thing, but I figured this would be pretty quick to throw
in and make the page not feel like a pain to use lmao
Oh yeah, a long-standing limitation. Good thing we're better at stuff
now!
This is also probably the real cause of the weird number of slight
discrepancies between main DTI and DTI 2020 when I eyeballed stuff lol
oh, well, that and the missing default-lists. A bit messy!
There was a time when I used an old proxy server to try to fix mixed
content issues, and I eventually removed it but never took the tendrils
out from the code.
We probably _should_ figure out how to secure these URLs! But until
then, we may as well simplify the code.
Eyyy tasty! There were some issues with conflicting styles with the main app, but I think we got it!
Scoping Chakra's CSS reset was a big deal to not accidentally overwrite the app's own styles lol, and we had to solve a specificity problem for that, thanks Aria for the :where tip!! <3
Idk this one might actually be a bit of a pain to load? But I'd want to optimize it differently anyway, and there's overhauls we're already planning to do here.
Just removing some caching and the expiration of it! There's still more superfluous(?) caching on the item page to audit, but these seem a bit more sensible about avoiding loading extra data.
Most of the reasoning is documented in the big comment. In short, we tried
to solve the problem with caching, but the caching should hardly be necessary
now that the bottleneck should be fixed. We'll see on production if it
actually solves the whole problem, but I've confirmed in the console that
redefining this function makes random_basic_per_species (as called during
rendering) a ton faster. And this way we keep our randomness, woo!
This is a surprisingly huge performance gain. On my testing (with
cache_classes set to true to also cache templates), this sped up
closet_hangers#index rendering by a factor of 2 when there were a
significant number of items. Cool beans.
I think we can even hold off on the individual hanger caching now:
we've made the closet hanger partial tons faster by moving forms out
of them and doing this cache check earlier. I'm expecting significant
performance gains both here and on items#index (though less so there).
I'll deploy and see how much it helps in production; if not enough, we
can look at the layered caching of hangers, lists, groups, full pages,
etc.
So glad we don't *have* to move to a pagination model!
items#show has been very slow recently, and I think it's because there's a lot
of querying to be done. Another option would have been to attempt to
short-circuit Item#supported_species if not body specific, but that would
still leave us with 1s load times for body specific items, which is not
satisfactory. The short-circuiting might still be worth doing, but probably
not now.
I'm also not sure that this is actually the core performance problem, but
we'll see. It definitely helped on the dev server: items#show took about
200ms on item pages where everything but species images were cached, then
took about 30ms on subsequent loads. Looking like a good candidate.
