Check out our application deployed at: https://tep-datacat.herokuapp.com/
DataCat is a POS system built for The Education Partnership, a local nonprofit organization in Pittsburgh. The Education Partnership's mission is to provide free school supplies to teachers, schools and children in the area. TEP has a Resource Center, which is a warehouse full of free school supplies that teachers can come and shop for. They get money and supply donations from different donors and track inventory of these supplies using a Salesforce backend. The purpose of DataCat is to streamline the process of entering teacher shopping data and updating Salesforce inventory accordingly.
One of the biggest things we had to consider when developing this system was the synchronization of data with Salesforce. We used Heroku Connect to read and write data to Salesforce. Heroku Connect allows us to poll data from Salesforce at a regular frequency into our Postgres database. To learn more about how Heroku Connect can be used to read data and step by step instructions, check out our Heroku Connect demo using a dummy Rails app here: https://github.com/stephaniepang97/hc_demo.
Currently, teachers, schools and items are polled every 10 minutes. In Salesforce, these objects are called Contacts, Accounts, and POS Transactions, respectively. After reading them into our database, they are stored as postgres tables in the salesforce schema called salesforce.account, salesforce.contact, and salesforce.pos_transactions__c. To filter the data we read and manipulate them so that we can use them in our respective Rails models, we created migrations (stored in the db/migrate folder) that create views from these tables called schools_view, teachers_view, and items_view.
If you are cloning our repo and want to deploy it to your own Heroku account, you will have to run the following commands (assuming you have Heroku Cli installed already):
git clone ...
heroku create
heroku addons:create herokuconnect:demo
heroku addons:add papertrail
git push heroku master
heroku run rake db:migrate
Then you can run heroku open to visit the app in your browser, and heroku pg:psql to work with your Heroku Postgres database in your terminal.
If styles and fonts are not working properly after deploying to heroku, you may need to run these commands locally to manually precompile assets.
$ rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production
$ git add .
$ git commit -a -m "Assets"
$ git push heroku master
To make our code run locally as well as on Heroku, we had to if statements in the migrations and models to check whether the salesforce tables exists and only execute certain commands if they do.
From a stackoverflow post, you can check if tables/views exists by doing:
To set up or reset local postgres database, make sure you have postgres installed and running, then do:
rails db:drop
rails db:setup
The rails db:setup command will create, migrate and seed (populate) the database with csv files of Teacher and School located in lib/seeds/. Seeding the teachers will take a while.
If default user is not showing locally, run:
bundle exec rake db:migrate:redo