Devlog #8

Database schemas + API planning

I’ve mostly been working on database schemas and models since the last devlog, and I’ve created APIs to allow the frontend to access this information from the database as well. A lot of systems design work has been going on in the background. As I’m still a beginner to such concepts, a lot of rewriting code has also been going on in the background!

To be honest, progress has slowed since I’ve been splitting myself between working on the frontend and backend. I often find myself getting a bit stuck or lost in what’s happening. I think I’ll work on completely finishing one thing before moving onto the next for the next devlog.

Below are snippets of what I’ve been working on, including API methods for the frontend, the API endpoints for the backend, and some peeks at some of the changes I’ve made to existing models/new models that I’ve created.

FileSystemWatcher

I’ll be using the built-in C# FileSystemWatcher in order to track which files and folders the user has made changes to. The alternative is polling for these changes on-demand (e.g. checking the folder’s “Last-Modified” date). However, the problem with such an approach is that Windows does not automatically update a folder’s “Last Modified” date exactly when a file inside that folder is changed. Thus, to confirm whether any changes actually occurred to a folder or not, the program would have to poll ALL subdirectories and files, which could be performance-intensive. On the other hand, FileSystemWatcher is an abstraction over OS-level kernel APIs. The kernel itself registers a listener on an attached folder when FileSystemWatcher is used. Thus it is very efficient and much more accurate than polling a folder’s properties.