Hearing Structure Renderer - department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow GitHub Wiki

The hearing structure renderer is a Rails console add-on that generates and formats a quick overview of any hearing related model and data, inspired by and implemented from the architecture of Intake Renderer.

Usage

Same usage as IntakeRender

Two ways to call the Hearing Renderer

> # the one-liner method
> puts HearingRenderer.render(hearing)
>
> # monkey-patching makes multiple calls more convenient
> HearingRenderer.patch_hearing_classes
> puts appeal.render_hearing
> puts appeal.hearing.render_hearing
> puts appeal.hearing.virtual_hearing.render_hearing

By default, PII is omitted from the rendered output, but it can be included explicitly:

> puts HearingRenderer.render(hearing, show_pii: true)
> puts hearing.render_hearing(show_pii: true)

Hearing notes and task instructions can often contain PII so those behind show_pii flag as well.

Some sample output:

[put finalized examples here]

The breadcrumbs section at the end of the output provides broader context for the rendered object, and always leads back to a veteran.

Implementation

Same core implementation as IntakeRender Pull Request

A note about printing / using the Tree gem

• We intentionally did not include any strings with / in them (URLs for example) because the Tree gem is implemented for printing directory structure and it interprets any strings with / as folder or file paths. Underneath the hood, TTY::Tree::Node is initialized with each given string and it uses Pathname to interpret the string as a file path and saves only the basename of the path as the node's name. Based on that, when the tree is printed, it prints only the basename. For example, if given the string hearings/12/details, it would only print details.

The following monkey patch would fix the issue but we decided not to pursue that:

module TTY
  class Tree
    class Node
      def initialize(path, parent, prefix, level)
        if path.is_a? String
          # strip null bytes from the string to avoid throwing errors
          path = path.delete("\0")
        end

        @path = Pathname.new(path)
        @name   = @path.to_s # <--- the only change; make node name the entire path
        @parent = Pathname.new(parent)
        @prefix = prefix
        @level  = level
      end
    end
  end
end