Properly validate incoming URL params and notify on failure

[ivan-aksamentov]

🙋 Feature Request

Current checks are somewhat sparse. Developer mistakes often snick into URLs.
We need to treat URLs as a proper I/O mechanism.

🔦 Context

😯 Describe the feature

• perform proper URL params validation and serialization using JSON schema tools
• perform error checks on all stages
• display an error message to the user in case of failure
• it is desirable to make code as generic as possible in order it to be reusing for other I/O mechanisms (Local Storage, files etc.). One might reuse a large portion of data files validation that is currently on place.

💻 Examples

💁 Possible Solution

Related

[joyendra]

Hi, I'm new to open source. I wanted to take up this project. Can you help me get started with it?

[ivan-aksamentov]

Hi @joyendra. Sure. Do you have difficulties in something particular?

Make sure you follow the Developer's guide and are able to run the application locally. Create a git branch, let' say "feat/url-validation" and start coding.

This particular issue is a bit tricky, but here are the steps to reproduce it:

• open the app in the browser
• go to "Sharing" dialog (last button in the button array in results section) and copy the URL
• now edit this URL manually to produce an obvious error: syntactic (e.g. remove one of the parentheses) or numeric (e.g. make population negative)
• try to navigate to this URL
• the app will either show a generic error page or will completely ignore the error, without letting the user know what's happening

I would like the URL parser's and schema validator's errors to propagate to the user interface, such that user would receive a meaningful information in order to be able to resolve the problem.

Let me know if you have further questions.

[joyendra]

Hey,
So when I do yarn install, I encounter this error every time.
[2/4] Fetching packages...
error An unexpected error occurred: "C:\Users\joyrb\Documents\GitHub\covid19_scenarios\.cache\yarn\v6\npm-@jest-types-25.5.0-4d6a4793f7b9599fc3680877b856a97dbccf2a9d-integrity\node_modules\@jest\types\.yarn-metadata.json: Unexpected end of JSON input".

[ivan-aksamentov]

@joyendra Something broke in your .cache directory? Try to delete it and run yarn install again

[joyendra]

Yup, figured it out.