[Mailman-Developers] [GSoC 2012] Metrics

[George Chatzisofroniou]

Hello,

I'm posting some additional details of my outline for this week. For
an easier reading please read it in my blog [1].

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Following a “top-down design” methodology, i came up with additional
detail of my design concept.

What information is stored?

As i have already mentioned the information is stored in Django models.

Author
This model represents an author of the mailing list. It mostly keeps
track of the number of postings and number of threads started.  It has
the following fields:

mail – CharField (Mail address of the author)
totalmails – IntegerField
totalthreads – IntegerField
firstmsgdate – DateTimeField
lastmsgdate – DateTimeField

MailingList
This model  counts  the total number of postings and threads started.

totalmails – IntegerField
totalthreads – IntegerField

Month
This model associates the author and the mailing list with each month.

author – ForeignKey
month – CharField
postscount – IntegerField
threadscount – IntegerField
mailinglist – Boolean (if this is true it corresponds to the whole mailing list)

Year
This model is similar to month. It has a year field instead of a month field.

What happens when a new email is posted to the list?

- The IArchiver interface will grab the email and send it to the Metrics class.
- The Metrics class will update the models:
 * If the author is sending to the mailing list for the first time, A
new Author row will be created to the database. Otherwise, the Posts
field will increase by one. - Also, the corresponding row of the two
foreign fields (Month and Year) will also increase by one.
 * The Posts field of the Mailing List model (as well as the the
related rows on the Month and Year models) will increase by one.

What happens when a user requests the Metrics page?

Django will generate a page based on the current models that outputs:

- On top, general metrics about total authors, total mails and total
threads, based on the MailingList model and below some charts (AJAX
based) that represents this information
- The authors of the mailing list ordered by the number of their total
posts, after the general metrics. Each user will correspond to a more
specific page with information like date of first and last message on
top and a chart on his overall activity below.

What will happen if the app is installed after an existing archive or
something crashes on the system? How do the metrics are being
recovered?

For this case there should be a special ‘Generate’ button in the admin
page. When this button is pressed, the class ‘Generate’ will be
triggered and:

- The Django models will be initialized (the metrics will go back to
zero). A progress bar will inform the administrator that the operation
is being held.
- All the messages of the archive will be parsed by performing a
direct Python call to the IArchiver. Another instance to the IArchiver
will grab any mails sent while the parsing is going on and store them
to a text file.
- The metrics will be generated from scratch.
- The mails stored to the text file will be added to the metrics
- The administrator will be informed with a success message when the
process is over.

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[1]: http://sophron.latthi.com/gsoc-mailman/?p=27


-- 
George Chatzisofroniou
sophron.latthi.com