Coding Period Week 10 (July 31 ~ August 6)
This week was highly analytical. Before we could merge the massive end-to-end Marketplace architecture we built over the last few weeks, we had to solve a critical execution flaw and meticulously plan the CI/CD documentation pipeline.
🎯 The Main Goals for the Week
- Investigate and resolve the library/dependency crash issue when users upload blocks with external libraries.
- Architect and plan the automated documentation workflow for the Marketplace blocks.
- Review and prepare all pending Pull Requests for the massive end-to-end merge scheduled for next week.
🐛 Investigating the Dependency Crash (Issue #470)
As we began testing the Marketplace workflow, we hit a wall: VisualCircuit only supports specific libraries built natively into its environment. If a user downloaded a custom block that contained an unsupported library (like cv2), the entire system would fail natively upon execution.
I spent a significant portion of the week researching how to solve this dynamically. My proposed solution was to use Python’s AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) to automatically scan the user’s custom block code for import and import from statements. By extracting the library name dynamically, we could map it to the correct internal dependency (e.g., mapping cv2 to python-vision). I began scripting this AST extraction logic to prepare it for a PR next week.
📑 Planning the CI/CD Documentation Architecture
The second major hurdle was figuring out how to automate the documentation generation for new blocks.
I mapped out the entire pipeline and quickly realized a major structural blocker: the documentation file (blocks.html) lived inside the main VisualCircuit repository, but the custom blocks were being pushed to the VisualCircuit-resources repository. Because they were in completely different repositories, the CI/CD pipeline couldn’t automatically edit the HTML file when a new block was approved!
After an intense planning session with my mentor, we decided the only viable path forward was to completely migrate the blocks.html file into the VisualCircuit-resources repository.
🤝 Mentor Meeting
We spent our meeting this week heavily focused on architecture. We reviewed the AST extraction theory, finalized the decision to migrate the documentation routing, and prepared all our pending PRs to be officially merged next week!