kwikreport - a report generation helper for weld inspection officers
Looking back at the last few weeks, and how hectic it had been, I just can't help but feel more satisfied with myself. For the past two weeks I and a friend of mine, Mr. Charles Ezebuike, started working on a project idea that would help ease the process of generating reports for weld inspection officers, which we decided to call - "kwikreport". This project is actually in fulfillment of one of the many requirements of the ALX SE program.
As a weld inspection officer himself, Mr. Charles saw the need for a means to ease the process of generating weld inspection reports and share them easily too. The goal is simple, help weld inspectors generate reports on the go, edit them as needed and share them remotely. This was the genesis of this project idea. For me, the catch was the fact that this wouldn't be one random project but one which tends to add value and solve a problem. This was exactly the kind of project I was looking forward to working on, something that solves a problem.
On this project, Mr. Charles mainly worked on the front end, while I did the back end. We decided to build it out using Django, so we could take advantage of some of the built-in features. For us, building out the report generation feature was paramount, so we didn't focus much on the UI (this is something we will eventually work better on), we used HTML, CSS, javascript, Bootstrap for quick styling and jQuery. Something we worked on was making sure the app was mobile responsive, as this was a very important part of our problem statement.
Currently, this project is live (you'll find useful links at the end of this article), we are not done, but the main feature is already set. Weld inspection officers can use it to create and share their reports on the fly. Reports are private by default, so others can't view the report until you make it public. Presently, anybody with the link to a public report can view it but we intend to make the report viewable by only a set of authorized users. Another major feature that we'll also be adding is the ability to export these reports in spreadsheet format as this is the main format weld inspection officers use. Other features we intend to implement include:
adding images to the header of each report
editing and removing rows
adding custom validation to the auto-generated form for adding rows
using a URL shortener for report links
and much more coming soon, please take a look at the project's readme on GitHub. If you happen to be a weld inspection officer, do check the live version out and give us feedback on features you would like us to implement.
Something I learned, while we worked on this project, is the power of teamwork and how important time management is. Combining work as an intern in an engineering firm and this was hectic, coupled with the fact that we were syncing on the project remotely, it really wasn't easy but yeah, we got this far, we've learned a lot and we are still learning. Do check out the project and give us feedback.
PS: If by any means, you want to contribute to this project idea, please feel free to reach out, we are open to contributors. You will find useful links below.