Contributing to an Existing App

Contributing to an Existing App

There are many reasons why you might want to contribute to an existing app:

• Add to or improve a translation
• Add to or improve documentation[1]
• Fix a usability issue
• Fix a bug
• Add a feature

The sections that follow will go through the entire workflow of contributing to a ClearOS app.

Example

As is often the case, it's sometimes easiest to follow a real-world example. The remaining sections of this tutorial on contributing to an existing app will follow exactly that.

ClearOS has a subscription engine built into the framework. It allows the developer to build apps around CPU core limits, users counts etc. One example is the licensing of the Kopano Basic - a ClearCenter supported app that integrates Kopano into the ClearOS LDAP/Account directory and provides the Kopano Communication and Collaboration Suite. A usability issue has been reported in support/forums that on occasion, a user who purchases additional user CALs not from the Marketplace but via an interaction with ClearCenter sales. In this case, a user sometimes has to wait up to 30 minutes (the cache timeout) for the additional CAL's to appear.

This is what a user would see if they had used all of their existing CALs, purchased more, but were waiting for the cache to expire:

We could tell them to drop to the command line and run:

clearcenter-subscriptions -n

To force a check of valid subscriptions and refresh the cached content. Many users, however, are not familiar with CLI. Wouldn't it be nice to add a "Refresh Subsciptions" button that triggered the script above. And so, with this in mind, follow along with the workflow while we make this change.