Things to think about before beginning a task

Jan 28, 2016

When beginning a new feature task, it is good to take the time and sit back and think about your approach. Come up with your game plan. Your play book. You should start by asking yourself, “Where am I getting the data from?”. This is probably one of the most key decisions that you can make before you get started. Are you getting data from more than one source? Grab a scratch piece of paper, or a blank text editor and start writing down some notes. Next question you should ask yourself is, “Is there options Out Of The Box (OOTB)?”. Ask yourself, “Is there something in our ecosystem that I can use and just make it more robust? A class that I can just extend?”. Most of the time it appears that this is the case. Which really, ultimately seems to make development a lot easier. You do not have to start over from scratch. You can just extend a class, or use a category, and add the data or methods that you need for your new feature. Take a few minutes to look through your existing code base. Check some things out, pseudo code, write notes, draw a mind map, do whatever you can find that allows you to wrap your head around the entire feature and how you are going to implement it.

In our particular case, we were working on a feature where we needed to add image url data to the SKU object. So, we knew that we already had a core class that generated a custom Color object, so let’s consider that our OOTB class that we can extend to make more robust. We also know that our data lived on the Color object’s parent object of Product. Since we were working with Oracle Commerce (OC), my partner showed me a really easy way to view the data that is being delivered to any OC page. You can simply append this query string onto the URL and it will show you all the data, ?format=json. Once you have the format though, at least in Google Chrome, it looks like just a giant unreadable string. Have no fear, my fellow engineer; there is an extension for that! I personally use JSONView, which will re-render the JSON into a readable format for you.

One more thing to remember before starting your feature, is set this rule for yourself, “Avoid, at all costs, changing a core class!” I have not done a lot of programming on top of another platform, like OC, most of my work has been done on a from scratch project. However, I have been told from a few coworkers and mentors that you can almost always get away with never changing a core class. For instance, at work the brave souls that we call Architects have designed a platform that sits on top of Oracle Commerce and enhance the functionality and accessibility. Therefore, we call this platform our “core” now. When we started our newest project, we have been extending those core classes to provide the specific functionality that is not included in our core platform. Sometimes this requires being extremely clever, sometimes it does in fact mean having to refactor a core class so that we can properly extend it in the new project. We have been using a type of classes called Categories, also known as partial classes.