ODE Trail

A small app for Open Data Ensemble Community Day. Attendees register with a selfie, check in at the venue, take two short quizzes, and leave feedback — all of it working with no internet at all. A leaderboard and a photo wall are built from what everyone syncs.

It also has an Attendance wall, which is the unusual part: that list is not collected by a form. It lives in this repository, and attendees put themselves on it by opening a pull request. Once it is merged and a new release goes out, the name appears inside the app on every phone in the room. The app is a working demonstration of the open source loop it is teaching.

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👋 Here for Community Day? Add your name

Your first task is to get your own name onto the Attendance wall: fork this repository, clone it, make a branch, and open a pull request. Never done that before? Good — the guide assumes exactly that and walks every step, from installing git to fixing a merge conflict.

→ Start here: CONTRIBUTING.md

Save yourself time and do this before the session: install git, set git config --global user.name and user.email, and sign in with gh auth login. Authentication is where nearly everyone gets stuck, because GitHub no longer accepts your account password on the command line.

If you get properly stuck, ask a host — and if all else fails, open an issue and a maintainer will add you. No one gets left off the wall.

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What it's built with

Plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no framework, no build step, no npm dependencies. That constraint is deliberate: you can read app/app.js from top to bottom and understand the entire app. It runs inside Formulus, the offline-first mobile runtime from Open Data Ensemble, and syncs to a Synkronus server.

Requirements

Requirement	Why
Formulus 1.3.0 or newer	persistObservation (used to stamp quiz scores) is @since 1.3.0. The app checks getVersion() at startup and shows a blocking notice on older hosts.
Node.js 18+	Only for the bundle and validation scripts.
Synkronus with admin credentials	To upload the app bundle.

The app only works inside Formulus (or the ODE Desktop workbench). Opened in a plain browser it will report that the Formulus bridge is unavailable.

Layout

app/                       # everything served to the WebView
  index.html               # entry point (required by Synkronus at app/index.html)
  app.js                   # all app logic
  attendees.js             # the Attendance wall — edited by pull request, not by a form
  formulus-load.js         # getFormulus() bridge loader
  style.css
  app.config.json          # name, version, light/dark theme for Formulus chrome
  assets/
forms/<formType>/          # one folder per form type
  schema.json              # JSON Schema draft-07
  ui.json                  # JSON Forms UI schema
scripts/
  validate-forms.js        # structural checks on forms/
  build-bundle.js          # zips app/ + forms/ into app-bundles/

Build

npm run validate      # structural checks only
npm run bundle        # validate, then write app-bundles/bundle-v<version>.zip

Or without npm:

node scripts/validate-forms.js
node scripts/build-bundle.js

The zip is named from version in app/app.config.json. Bump that (and package.json, which is kept in step manually) before building a release.

app-bundles/ is gitignored and never committed. Build output does not belong in the repository — run the script when you need a zip.

Publish

Upload the zip from app-bundles/ to your Synkronus server, then ask the room to sync from the Formulus Sync tab. Devices pick up the new bundle on their next sync.

Contributing

Everyone is welcome, especially if this would be your first open source contribution — see CONTRIBUTING.md and our Code of Conduct.

License

MIT © Open Data Ensemble