Self-hosted Plausible instance! I have need of usage numbers again,
after a good few years of just not using it; but I don't want to send
the data to Google, and I enjoy self-hosting things, so here we have it!
We haven't used the mall spider in this app in forever (I guess we even
deleted the code at some point?), but there was some vestigial stuff
left. Goodbye!
There was a static page explaining it, which we no longer link to; and
there was an unused field in the User model for who was a beta tester
for it. Goodbye!
Just moving more stuff over! I modernized Item's `as_json` method while
I was here. (Note that I removed the NC/own/want fields, because I
think the only other place this method is still called from is the
quick-add feature on the closet lists page, and I think it doesn't use
these fields to do anything: updating the page is basically a full-page
reload, done sneakily.)
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.
Ok progress! We've moved the info about what bodies this fits, and
what zones it occupies, into a Rails API endpoint that we now load at
the same time as the other data!
We'll keep moving more over, too!
I changed my mind again! At first I wanted to make the special case
clearer, and to be able to more strongly assert that the species is
not null. But now I'm like… eh, there's code that references `body.id`
that has no reason _not_ to work in the all-bodies case… let's just
keep the types more consistent, I think.
This is more similar to what impress-2020 does, I was working on the
wardrobe-2020 code and took some inspiration!
The body has an ID and a species, or is the string "all".
Preparing a better endpoint for wardrobe-2020 to use! I deleted the
now-unused swf_assets#index endpoint, and replaced it with an
"appearances" concept that isn't exactly reflected in the database
models but is a _lot_ easier for clients to work with imo.
Note that this was a big part of the motivation for the recent
`manifest_url` work—in this draft, I'm probably gonna have the client
request the manifest, rather than use impress-2020's trick of caching
it in the database! There's a bit of a perf penalty, but I think that's
a simpler starting point, and I have a hunch I'll be able to make up
the perf difference once we have the impress-media-server managing more
of these responsibilities.
Ok so, impress-2020 guesses the manifest URL every time based on common
URL patterns. But the right way to do this is to read it from the
modeling data! But also, we don't have a great way to get the modeling
data directly. (Though as I write this, I guess we do have that
auto-modeling trick we use in the DTI 2020 codebase, I wonder if that
could work for this too?)
So anyway, in this change, we update the modeling code to save the
manifest URL, and also the migration includes a big block that attempts
to run impress-2020's manifest-guessing logic for every asset and save
the result!
It's uhh. Not fast. It runs at about 1 asset per second (a lot of these
aren't cache hits), and sometimes stalls out. And we have >600k assets,
so the estimated wall time is uhh. Seven days?
I think there's something we could do here around like, concurrent
execution? Though tbqh with the nature of the slowness being seemingly
about hitting the slow underlying images.neopets.com server, I don't
actually have a lot of faith that concurrency would actually be faster?
I also think it could be sensible to like… extract this from the
migration, and run it as a script to infer missing manifest URLs. That
would be easier to run in chunks and resume if something goes wrong.
Cuz like, I think my reasoning here was that backfilling this data was
part of the migration process… but the thing is, this migration can't
reliably get a manifest for everything (both cuz it depends on an
external service and cuz not everything has one), so it's a perfectly
valid migration to just leave the column as null for all the rows to
start, and fill this in later. I wish I'd written it like that!
But anyway, I'm just running this for now, and taking a break for the
night. Maybe later I'll come around and extract this into a separate
task to just try this on all assets missing manifests instead!
Ahh, I guess I missed these, I think they're maybe not actually used in
the app is why? cuz they're all default values that are overridden at
the actual call sites. But I ran into it when running `Pet.load` in the
console, and yeah let's just fix 'em up!
This hasn't worked for a while, and I don't know an API off the top of
my head to drop in for it. Let's just delete it for now, and revisit it
later if we want to!
Dang, I'm really wishing I'd opened this sooner cuz I didn't realize it
would be THIS easy!!
The bug was that the `t` method started taking Ruby keyword params
instead of a hash object for `options`, so the syntax changed.
Womp womp!
Really don't know why this wasn't a problem with Apollo (or was it??),
but yeah, don't save when there's a save error!! Then we reset the
mutation state when the outfit state changes.
It's weird to be reading this code and be like. was this not always an
issue? Maybe something in Apollo prevented this? Did we use optimistic
UI or something? Idk?
There's still an issue with it infinitely retrying in an error state
though.
Just sharing this out to gather info, since this might be coming kinda
soon!
I also moved the announcement higher up in the template, because it
gets broken on the user lists page which uses floats quite a bit for
the site header—and tbh I feel like this is better anyway lol.
In the impress-2020 app, we use this to prepopulate certain GraphQL
data into the Apollo cache when SSR'ing a page. We don't do that here,
so, goodbye!
The wardrobe-2020 app had a cute drawer that embeds the item page, but
honestly I don't think it was that valuable, and especially not when it
means we have to basically maintain two item pages lol. Let's decrease
the surface area!
A really really simple change! It works on the item page, the item
index page, item search, the homepage, and the item lists page.
The main reason I avoided this for so long (even before modernizing the
Rails app) was that the ElasticSearch stuff felt like it made it messy?
But now it's pretty simple, and it works in search already cuz I did
that when I implemented item search, so, nice!
Ok cool, I have just not been running any of this since moving out of
impress-2020, but now that we're doing serious JS work in here it's time
to turn it back on!!
1. Install eslint and the plugins we use
2. Set up a `yarn lint` command
3. Set up a git hook via husky to lint on pre-commit
4. Fix/disable all the lint errors!
Rather than letting the fact that the server API models outfits a bit
differently (underscore keys, integer IDs for things), I'd rather
convert it to the familiar field names and expected types!
This came in a few parts!
1. Add meta tags to let us know we're logged in.
2. Install React Query, which has the data-loading sensibilities I like
about Apollo without the GraphQL that has honestly been a drag.
3. Replace the outfit-loading and outfit-saving calls with API calls to
the main app.
4. Update the main app's API calls to use our more flexible data
constructs like "pose".
Would've loved to do this more incrementally, but it's hard to! You
can't split out outfit-loading and outfit-saving, or auth from any of
that, or the state gets all out-of-sorts.
Still, this is a good nugget we've pulled out all-in-all, and one that
people have been asking for! Can maybe look to logged-in item search
soon too, for own/want data?
Moreover, this code is in a bit of a flimsy state anyway: it'll kinda
work if you're logged in at impress-2020.openneo.net, but that wasn't
intentionally engineered, and I'm not sure exactly what circumstances
cause those cookies to send vs not send?
My intent is to clean up to replace all this with login code that
references the main app instead… this'll require swapping out some
endpoints to refer to what the main app has, but I'm hoping that's not
so tricky to do, since the main app does offer basically all of this
functionality already anyway. (That's not to say it's simple, but I
think it's a migration in the right direction!)
I used the new profiler tools on this page, and noticed a lot of
allocations in the Globalize library, which we use for translating
database records. I realized that we were loading all of the fields of
not just all of the items on the page, but all of their translation
records in all locales! We used to scrape data for lots of languages, so
that can be quite a lot!
Unfortunately, Rails's `includes` method to efficiently preload related
records always loads all fields, and simply can't be overridden.
So, in this change we write manual preloading code, to identify the
records we need, load them in big bulk queries, and assign them back to
the appropriate associations. Basically just what `includes` does, but
written out a bit more, to give us the chance to specify SELECT and
WHERE clauses!
It shows up in development always, and if you're logged in as Me
Specifically in production!
I'm using this to poke at memory usage for pages that seem suspicious.
I don't know why our app reliably grows so large in RAM, but my hunch is
that maybe there are some pages that just use a truly large amount to
begin with - and I've learned Ruby doesn't release memory back after
it's GC'd, it just grows the process and keeps the free space to itself
in its own heap!
So I'm just eyeing pages that I know *can* have a lot going on, and
seeing what I find!
We used to do this for weird clever caching tricks that I don't think
were actually very effective. We stopped using this a few months ago,
and now I'm finally cleaning up this supporting code!
Huh, Arel can *sometimes* handle just having an attribute stand in as
"X is true" in a condition, but sometimes gets upset about it. I guess
this changed in Rails since we recently wrote this?
Specifically, item search would crash on "is:nc" (but *not* "is:np"),
saying:
```
undefined method `fetch_attribute' for #<struct Arel::Attributes::Attribute relation=#<Arel::Table:0x0000000109a67110 @name="items", @klass=Item(…), @type_caster=#<ActiveRecord::TypeCaster::Map:0x0000000109a66e90 @klass=Item(…)>, @table_alias=nil>, name="is_manually_nc">
```
The traceback was a bit misleading (it happened at the part where we
merge all the scopes together), but that hinted to me that it working
with an attribute in a place where it expected a conditional. So I
converted the attribute in the `is_nc` scope to a conditional, and made
the matching change in `is_np`, and that fixed it! Ok phew!
