The MacroDeck Platform

The MacroDeck platform is a library for Ruby that works with CouchRest to provide a semi-schemaless database layout. Semi-schemaless means that CouchDB doesn't enforce a schema, but we do. Documents have a distinct type and each type corresponds to a different object. An event and a place are similar and related, but we can't just have fields on there all willy-nilly :).

License

This library is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later (at your option), with the exception that Poseidon Imaging retains all copyright and can sublicense any code.

Please do not submit patches unless you agree to these terms.

Startup

To start the MacroDeck platform, put this in your config/environments/name.rb file:

MacroDeck::Platform.start!("database-name")

You can call it whatever, or even load it from database.yml. Since this library does not depend on Rails, this doesn't happen automatically. Patches welcome for code that automatically determines if Rails is being used and adds magic if so.

Tests

I haven't been good about adding tests in the past - so suggestions are definitely welcome. This library will hopefully be very well tested by the time it gets put into production.

Attachment Plan

Here's some bullet points for how I think that we should implement attachments. It would be nice to be able to leverage Paperclip, but I think that given the fact that the MacroDeck Platform is very disconnected from ActiveRecord, it would probably take more work to make Paperclip work than it would be to implement something that sends files off to S3 and keeps track of where they are.

• Use right_aws gem.
• Allow the bucket name to be configured somehow by the hosting application. Probably in a similar way to how the platform chooses a database name?
• Get a RightAws::S3::Bucket instance. Should this be initialized when the platform boots? Probably?
• Determine a standard naming convention. /attachments/Class/id/attachmentname.ext works for me. The attachment name probably needs to be randomly selected, maybe another UUID?
• An object should probably support many attachments.
• Not sure how to use RightAWS to generate a temporary link (needs research).
• Can use bucket.key(path).public_link but this doesn't make a temporary link (so anyone who knows the URL can get the attachment... though if the filenames are UUIDs, maybe this is OK)
• It appears that there's something like interface.get_link that allows you to specify a bucket name, key, and validity duration. This could work.