KioskTUI

An application to track purchased items in the Online Kiosk. Uses NCurses and Zettle API to display the information with python helper scripts.

Dependencies

To use the TUI, you should have installed and assured that the following are working:

1. gcc
2. g++
3. NCurses
4. Sqllite
5. python

For development, the following two should be installed and working:

1. clang
2. bear

The software has not been tested on windows, as the windows terminal emulator infrastructure has really bad graphical protocols/compatibility. MacOS should work (UNIX based, iTERM's graphical protocol etc). It has also been tested on server configurations with no DE or compositor, and everything runs properly, though the graphical borders get converted to true ascii characters instead.

Use

To use the TUI:

The database must be initialized before synchronization can work

make db

When db init is successful, you can sync it (this requires Zettle API keys placed in the .env)

make sync

The script keeps running until interruption, so it is recommended to use tmux or another type of terminal multiplexer to the sync script in a different pane, and use another for the tui itself.

Finally the binaries can be built and the application launched in the terminal

make && ./leaderboard

Automation

For it to run persistently on a machine, a systemd service file for leaderboard and sync has been added. Since it uses systemd specific configurations, if the linux distribution uses another init system, it won't work out of the box. An equivalent service definition would have to be created for these systems. Before enabling the service, change the values in both service files to:

User= to the user account that should run the application. WorkingDirectory= to the directory containing the application. ExecStart= to the full path of the executable.

Afterwards copy the service file to /etc/systemd/system/

sudo cp leaderboard.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo cp sync.service /etc/systemd/system/

Then reload systemd and enable the service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now leaderboard.service
sudo systemctl enable --now sync.service

To confirm that it works, run:

sudo systemctl status leaderboard.service
sudo systemctl status sync.service

Testing

Run the testing framework using:

make test

The tests written emulate Zettle transactions and are meant to test response time of the tui as well as edge cases (such as how it responds to max items in a transaction). All the injected test data can be removed after observation with a prompt after test finish.

Note: some of the larger bulk purchases seem to occupy the database long enough for it to be a significant delay after insertion and the ability to insert more values. A large bulk purchase before a single, small one is as of yet terribly inefficient.

Development

Clang tools have been used for development and added to the Makefile and repo. This can be ignore for basic use of the tui, but deserve to be mentioned in the docs. The Clang-tidy (not LSP) tool is used in the Makefile to run both a regular checkup of the code, checkup with available, automatic fixes and also formatting the code consistently should this be wished.

These are used running the following commands.

Checkup with no fix:

make tidy

Checkup with fixes:

make tidy-fix

Formating the code:

make format

The Clang dependency is not used for other purposes, meaning a machine that doesn't have this or the Bear compilation db generator will be fine for general use, as again this only touches the development workflow. Bear is needed to regenerate the compile_commands.json for use with clang-tidy.