Support modifications via a proposal layer

[danaradg]

What was achieved

• Users can authenticate with Google
• Users can see their location on the map
• Authenticated users can:
  • Confirm unconfirmed trees
  • Mark information as up to date
  • Edit tree fields and upload images
  • View field change history

Behind the Scenes

• Change history is stored in Firebase separately from the original dataset. The UI merges the information.
• There's a feature flag called enableauth that is false by default, and only when enabled the UI shows the new interfaces. You can enable it by adding ?enableauth=true to the URL.
• Firebase is currently hosted in a temporary Google Classroom GCP project and needs to be setup under Hasadna's resources.

Setting Up Firestore

1. In GCP, create a new Firestore project

2. In the project, initialize FireStore and create a new DB called "treebase-proposals", with a collection called "propsoals". Set the following access rules:

rules_version = '2';
service cloud.firestore {
  match /databases/{database}/documents {
    match /proposals/{proposalId} {
      // Allow anyone to read existing proposals
      allow read: if true;

      // Allow any authenticated user (including anonymous & Google users) to create proposals
      allow create: if request.auth != null;

      // Allow author to update or delete their proposal
      allow update, delete: if request.auth != null && request.auth.uid == resource.data.authorUid;
    }
  }
} 

3. In the project, initialize Storage. Set the following access rules:

rules_version = '2';

service firebase.storage {
  match /b/{bucket}/o {
    match /proposals/images/{fileName} {
      allow read, write: if request.auth != null;
    }
  }
}

4. Under Settings -> General for the Firebase project, scroll down to Your Apps -> SDK setup and configuration -> Config. Copy the code snippet containing the API key, domains, paths, etc and paste it into app/config/firebase_config.ts

Gaps & Future Work

• The current version expects the Firebase config file to be under projects/treebase/src/app/config/firebase-config.ts. It should take the path from the environment.
• The app is not mobile friendly. There are issues with the map's touch interface which is crucial for selecting trees, and there are issues with the layout making the sidebar unusable.
• Any authenticated user can edit any tree. At minimum we need to be able to restrict editing to only persons assigned to the municipality where the tree resides in.
• All proposals are currently pulled from the DB at startup, and this is obviously not scalable. It's easy to limit it with respect to the tree sidebar view, but a bit harder around the map view where we use it to check if the certainty of the tree has changed.
• Proposals should be periodically synched in the background to create a new version of the dataset. Then we can shard the proposals database by date and merge only proposals since the last sync point.

[lisardggY]

Ideally, we would want to integrate the auth-service with the backend service used by the SocialProcurement site to assign roles to users based on municipal association.