This week’s efforts have been concentrated on perfecting the focus feature and putting it into action. I was introduced to a new type of react native hooks, and the old logic was discarded in favor of the new. By the end of the week, the update had been successfully patched, and the overall result was encouraging.
Fixing last week’s bugs and running through all of the scripts to make sure the focus moves from one box to another as intended, was where I started this week. In addition, after consulting with Mr. Peter and digging into the code, we realize that using Boolean to implement the focus is problematic and leaves behind obvious problems. To that end, he advised that I study the useReducer hook and try to execute the focus with it.
Following that, I gained an understanding of the useReducer concept, structure and implementation, which is typically utilized for complex state logic. However, I met some difficulties to apply the focus implementation in the reducer because we are using a separate component so that was more complex than I expected.
Next, Mr. Peter devised the optimal solution by implementing the focus in a function using ref and invoking it. Compared to the previous usage of a timer that was unpredictable or a boolean that was producing bugs, calling one function by passing the box ref only was far more efficient.
Lastly, after implementing the new solution on every screen, I had to modify the keyboard toggle logic to operate well with the text box focus. I also altered the styles a bit to make the content fit more with the device. And with my supervisor’s confirmation on the current version so I eventually patched the update successfully with all improvements and bugs addressed.