# Documentation for development

> [!WARNING]  
> TODO: This document is a work in progress. Please help us improve it!

See those other useful documents as well:
- [knowledge.md](knowledge.md) for high-level architecture and design decisions.
- [README.md](../backend/api/README.md) for the backend API
- [README.md](../backend/email/README.md) for the email routines and how to set up a local server for quick email rendering
- [README.md](../web/README.md) for the frontend / web server
- [TESTING.md](TESTING.md) for testing guidance and direction

### Adding a new profile field

A profile field is any variable associated with a user profile, such as age, politics, diet, etc. You may want to add a new profile field if it helps people find better matches.

To do so, you can add code in a similar way as in [this commit](https://github.com/CompassConnections/Compass/commit/940c1f5692f63bf72ddccd4ec3b00b1443801682) for the `religion` field. If you also want people to filter by that profile field, you'll also need to add it to the search filters, as done in [this commit](https://github.com/CompassConnections/Compass/commit/a4bb184e95553184a4c8773d7896e4b570508fe5) (for the `religion` field as well). 

Note that you will also need to add a column to the `profiles` table in the dev database before running the code; you can do so via this SQL command (change the type if not `TEXT`):
```sql
ALTER TABLE profiles ADD COLUMN profile_field TEXT;
```

Store it in `add_profile_field.sql` in the [migrations](../backend/supabase/migrations) folder and run [migrate.sh](../scripts/migrate.sh) from the root folder:
```bash
./scripts/migrate.sh backend/supabase/migrations/add_profile_field.sql
```

Then sync the database types from supabase to the local files (which assist Typescript in typing):
```bash
yarn regen-types dev
```

That's it!

### Adding a new language

Adding a new language is very easy, especially with translating tools like large language models (ChatGPT, etc.) which you can use as first draft.

- Add the language to the LOCALES dictionary in [constants.ts](../common/src/constants.ts) (the key is the locale code, the value is the original language name (not in English)).
- Duplicate [fr.json](../web/messages/fr.json) and rename it to the locale code (e.g., `de.json` for German). Translate all the strings in the new file (keep the keys identical). LLMs like ChatGPT may not be able to translate the whole file in one go; try to copy-paste by batch of 300 lines and ask the LLM to `translate the values of the json above to <new language> (keep the keys unchanged)`. In order to fit the bottom navigation bar on mobile, make sure the values for those keys are less than 10 characters: "nav.home", "nav.messages", "nav.more", "nav.notifs", "nav.people".
- Duplicate the [fr](../web/public/md/fr) folder and rename it to the locale code (e.g., `de` for German). Translate all the markdown files in the new folder. To do so, you can copy-paste each file into an LLM and ask it to `translate the markdown above to <new language>`.

That's all, no code needed!