Limitations

Overview

This pages describes current limitations of the portal. These limitations must be addressed before starting to use the portal to generate insights.

The objective of Milestone 2 is to have our first users testing the portal and providing feedback. None of the listed limitations are critical to achieve this objective.

Critical limitations

Separate large description from common object

The Entity model includes the property description. While this property could be used to provide a short description about the entity (e.g. Project, Memo, Report, etc.), it is used for some models to store large description generated using our Quill editor. Such description can be particularly heavier when inline images have been added to the description (another limitation).

Suggested solution:

• Define separately short and large descriptions
  • Identify models that benefit from having a short description, e.g. Project to show a brief description to the users invited to join a project and provide them background on the project before they accept the invite.
  • If kept as a property of Entity, make it possibly optional
• Create a DB collection for the purpose of storing Quill descriptions

Do not store images inline

Images added to Report, Memo, etc. should be uploaded and served by an external imaging service. Delegating the image traffic outside of the portal backend will remove an heavy load from the backend and make the client-backend communication more responsive.

Suggested solution: Add an imaging service to the portal stack, for example Thumbor (Thomas' note: I have experience deploying and working with this service).

Conduct a security audit

While a particular attention has been devoted to the implementation of a robust authentication and authorization systems to protect the portal, it is strongly advised to order a security audit of the portal before starting to use the portal with a large base of users.

Moderate limitations

Large images are included in the app bundle

The app bundle currently includes heavy pictures that are used on the home page or to seed objects (seeds may be ultimately removed). In a production environment, large images must be stored outside of the app and served by an external service, for example. This service can also be used to store images added to Insights (Report, Memo, etc.), user picture, etc.

Suggested solution: Add an imaging service to the portal stack, for example Thumbor (Thomas' note: I have experience deploying and working with this service).