1. Table of contents
  2. For developers
  3. Webapp
  4. Webapp basics

Basic information about the RED FLAGS webapp

Used frameworks

The Red Flags webapplication is built on top of Spring Boot (just like the engine), so it uses the Spring framework and Spring MVC. The application uses both Spring JPA and Spring JDBC to fetch information from the database. JPA is used for managing user accounts and filters, JDBCTemplate is used to fetch public procurements' data.

To generate HTML output, RedFlags uses Freemarker template engine.

The client side uses Bootstrap CSS/JS framework and jQuery. Charts are generated with HighCharts, the carousel on the front page is made with Owl Carousel, and the notices' filter form is using Bootstrap Date Range Picker and Bootstrap Select. 3rd party scripts and stylesheets are linked from CDNs.

Here you can see the workflow of the web application. If you are familiar with the MVC pattern, you won't see anything new.

You can read about the most important configuration properties here, but there are some additional options, see below.

Internationalization (i18n)

Of course, the Red Flags website designed to be able to read in multiple langauges. All of the displayed texts are loaded from language files, from src/main/resources/. Language files are named messages_{LANG}.properties to the classpath root, where {LANG} is the language code, e.g. hu, en, pl. In these properties files, special characters (outside Latin-1) must be escaped using \uHHHH format. (The Spring configuration is in I18n.java.)

The language chooser loads the list of languages from the site.languages property (handled in LangAdvice.java), which must contain language codes separated by comma, e.g. site.languages: en,hu,pl.

There's an additional language code list property called site.facebookLanguages which is needed for the Facebook Like plugin, because it uses a different language code format. You must list the same languages in the same order as above, like this: site.facebookLanguages: en_US,hu_HU,pl_PL.

The tooltip texts of the language chooser buttons are defined in lang.{LANG} message properties, e.g. lang.en=English version. I think each button must have the same tooltip in every language, I mean lang.en=English version should be the same in any language file, because this button is only for people who speak English.

The "About the project" section on the front page is also multilingual but it's outside of properties files. The texts are in src/main/resources/templates/about_{LANG}.html files and imported automatically by index.ftl.

Plural forms

Some messages have multiple plural forms. The webapp uses ICU4J package to determine which form (which message) has to be used for a given numeric value in the current display language. Therefore some messages have variations with different suffixes referring to the plural form. These messages are:

English and Hungarian languages both require only the "one" and "other" form, so for example charts.flag message presents in the en and hu properties files like this:

charts.flag.one=flag
charts.flag.other=flags

Other languages may require other forms, please see the Language Plural Rules table.

Site message

If you need to display a notification message on the website, you can use the site.message property (handled in SiteAdvice.java).

First, create a message property in every language file, e.g. site.message.myMessage=My message, then specify the message property in site.message: site.message=site.message.MyMessage.

The message can contain HTML tags as well. It will be wrapped inside a well-sm, for example:

Value scale

By default, the Red Flags webapp will display values (estimated and total final values) in millions. You can override this by specifying a new value for site.valueScale property.

Make sure you create the appropriate messages for your setting. For example, if you set site.valueScale=1000, you have to specify these messages:

Total value chart

The total value chart reads the data from rfwl_barplot table which contains sum values for all years, contract types and currencies. The query filters this table by the currency specified in site.sumValueChartCurrency property.

Captcha

Users need to fill a captcha to log in, register or request a password change. Sometimes it gets annoying to fill in everytime when developers need to test the site. There is an option to turn off the captcha for test purposes.

If you set site.useCaptcha property to false the captcha validator mechanism (SecuritySvc.java) will return constant true and also the captchas won't appear on the site (handled in SiteAdvice.java and login.ftl).

Default user accounts

Defaults users are handled by DefaultUsers.java. It's an InitializingBean, which reads and executes the SQL script in default-users.sql using JdbcTemplate.

It can contain something like this:

replace rfwl_users (id, active, crypted_password, email_address, lang, name, registered_at, remember_token, remember_token_expires_at) values (1, 1, 'PASSWORD-HASH', 'EMAIL', 'en', 'DISPLAY NAME', '2016-06-01 00:00:00', null, null);

There is a password crypter utility in src/test/java: PassEncoder.java. How to use: