- There should be enough information in the DB as currently designed and populated to do much if not all of what we want, at least from the point of view of someone looking at the web front end. Log files generated by the site update process would continue to show stats for all systems for all users.
- The implementation challenges seem to break down into a few categories:
1. How to specify which systems/regions/countries/continents/tiers/etc. should be included and excluded for a given page load. This would likely be part of the long-planned control panel page (
https://github.com/TravelMapping/Web/issues/351). As stated before, I would want to implement this to be completely flexible. If someone wants all of Europe, only Future interstates and the Nebraska Links and Spurs, and nothing else, they should be able to do that.
2. How to remember that information.
a. My thought is that it would most likely would be done in a browser cookie or cookies.
b. I'd like to allow people to save those to these settings to their computer in a config file that could be reloaded if cookies are cleared, loaded into other browsers, shared with other users, etc.
c. Maybe those config files could be stored in GitHub as a way to select among subsets people have put together based on their own interests.
3. Updating all of the affected SQL queries to limit them to the desired subset of highway data. A quick count shows 77
tmdb_query calls in TM's php code, and a significant fraction of them will be affected. It will take some planning to come up with a way to update them all in a consistent and coherent way, and to make sure whatever changes are made to the queries are not only correct, but that the queries do not become significantly slower.
- I think this functionality needs to be in place before any new unsigned systems being discussed in other threads would progress past devel status. With a compressed semester starting up soon, I am unlikely to work on it before June. That said, I am very interested in getting this functionality in place and will work on it sooner if time permits.