Functional UI

Input TLE, retrieve Orbit

A basic version of the UI I had in mind is now available at api.thiago.pub:8080! For now, it simply lets the user enter a TLE and retrieve the string Orbit. This is what it looks like:

It’s a simple Node app I created from scratch, which was a lot of fun to do. The two areas that gave me the most trouble: CSS and figuring out the proper encoding for the form content.

I initially issued a POST request from the form without worrying about encoding, but quickly realized the content would be URL-encoded. And that was hard to decode properly for various reasons. I got pretty close to a somewhat reasonable solution, but not to the finish line.

At that point, I took a step back and thought to myself: there must be a way to avoid URL-encoding the contents in the first place. That’s when I learned about the multipart/form-data encoding (doc), which is often used when inputting files. That helped me solve my problem, even if I wish I had landed on a more elegant implementation. At least I got to add a variable called bodyParts to my code. :P