Boston Coordinated Access

Introduction

The Boston Coordinated Access system was started by the City of Boston, Dept. of Neighborhood Development to help in matching homeless individuals to housing vacancies based on need. The Coordinated Access system centralizes vacancies to permanent supportive housing units using a customisable rule-based system. Once a match is proposed by the sytem using these rules it supports web/email based workflow to work with the client, Dept. of Neighborhood Development staff, Sheleter Agencies and Housing providers to verify eligability and coordiante the housing oppertunity. See [docs/Flow May Vouchers.pdf](../blob/master/docs/Flow May Vouchers.pdf) for an example.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the the license is available in LICENCE.md

Application Design

The application designed around the HUD Data Standards. You can find copies of some relavent documenation in the docs folder.

The application is written primarily in Ruby on Rails and we use RVM to select the current supported ruby version. Other ruby version managers should work fine as would manually installing the ruby version mentioned in the .ruby-version

The application uses postgres as a default primary data storage. Data connectors to other HMIS systems is not included in this release but simple example method using CSV files is available. In Boston's deployment we have connections using various combinations of Microsoft SQL Server, SFTP of CSV and XML, and live API connections.

We've develop locally on OSX using homebrew and deploy to Ubuntu 16.04 using apt for dependancies.

Developer Prequisites

If you are unfamilar with contributing to open source projects on github you may first want to read some of the guides at: https://guides.github.com/

There is a simple script to setup a development environment in bin/setup. To make it run smoothly you should have:

• A running Ruby 2.3+ environment with bundler 1.11+ installed.
• A local install of postgresql 9.4+ allowing your user to create new databases.

Once these are in-place bin/setup should:

• Install all ruby dependancies.
• Create initial copies of configuration files.
• Create an initial database and seed it with reference data and a randomly generated admin user.
• Add some example data that in production would come from your HMIS integration.

If all goes well you should then be able to run bin/rails server and open the CAS in your system at http://localhost:3000 using the email/password created during bin/setup. If not, read bin/setup to figure out what when wrong and fix it.

Hack on your version as you see fit and if you have questions or want to contibute open an issue on github.

Developer notes

We use the following common rails gem's and conventions:

• haml for view templating
• bootstrap for base styles and layout
• sass for custom-css
• simple_form for forms
• kaminari for pagination
• brakeman for basic security scanning.
• rack-mini-profiler to make sure pages are fast. Ideally <200ms
• helpers need to be explictly loaded in controllers. i.e. we have config.action_controller.include_all_helpers = false set
• bin/rake generate controller ... doesn't make fixures and they are disabled in test_helper. We dont use them and instead seed data in test or let test create their own data however they need to.
• it also doesn't make helper or asset stubs, make them by hand if you need one. See config/application.rb for details.