Overview:

This is a prototype for TIGRA’s ‘Economic Citizenship App’ to demonstrate how a user can enter information and get an economic citizenship score. The main logic is a module called ‘econ-cit.js’’ that holds the scoring logic. Scoring logic divided into categories of information like banking, credit score, community engagement, savings, groceries spending, and entertainment spending. The front-end uses the econ-cit.js module to display appropriate form inputs to the user and, based on that input, calculate scores. The back-end uses the econ-cit.js module to save the user’s data in a format consistent with the front-end.

Stack:

• MongoDB as database
• node.js server using Express and Mongoose, hosted on Heroku
• Backbone front-end
• a little Bootstrap markup in the html.

File Structure:

• server.js: runs node.js server that serves /public files as static content, and sets up what’s in the routes directory
• Procfile: used by Heroku to start app
• package.json: used by Heroku to handle dependencies
• /public
  • index.html: sets up container for Backbone and loads scripts
  • /js
  • econ-cit.js: see below
  • jst.js: Holds underscore templates used by main.js
  • main.js: Implements all front-end functionality. Uses a User model and Category model to handle display and interactions.
  • /styles
  • main.css : not much here now
• /routes

•  index.js: *implements a json API that lets Backbone talk to the MongoDB.*
  

*/passport

• init.js: implements passport.js strategies for user login and registration.
• /views: TODO delete this directory
• /models
  • models.js: implements back-end user model for mongoose
• /node_modules: automatically created directory by node to handle dependencies

econ-cit.js

• Purpose:encode the economic citizenship scoring logic in one place, and in a way that is easily configurable & adjustable.
• available to the front-end and back-end.
• exports functions necessary for accessing category information and scoring.
• A Category object encodes the logic for the various attributes of a Citizenship Score, such as banking, or grocery spending. Its most important attributes are:
  • name (of the category)
  • inputs. Each category requires specific inputs to calculate a subscore for the category. This is an object mapping the name of an input to the user's value for that input.
  • calculationFunction: takes the inputs object as an argument and outputs a subScore between 1 and 5, according to logic specific to the category.

TODOs:

• improve back-end data validation
• Improve scoring display
• Improve README.md
• Incorporate require.js to allow better file structuring, like breaking up main.js into multiple files.
• Allow multiple Economic Citizenship entries per user. Requires redesign of user home page to allow user option of viewing and editing existing entries, or creating a new one.
• complete community engagement scoring function
• improve sign-in information so remembering password isn't a problem