Session log — Named per-session recording logs (v0.14.0)

20 June 2026, afternoon · Zoom Companion · Hasmukh with Claude · auto-published from the local journal entry. A polished narrative version can be requested in any future Claude session.

Summary

Hasmukh is running the Medilearn camera app in an all-day production. The Zoom meeting and the bot sit in it all day. Between sessions there are speaker changeovers, nature breaks and lunch or coffee breaks, where most participants switch their cameras off as expected. The single join-to-leave log therefore mixes real session data with break noise and is not very useful.
He asked for two things: a way to choose when logging starts and stops, and the ability to name a log before starting it. The goal is to get accurate, cleanly named per-session logs out of one continuous meeting, without joining and leaving repeatedly.
Built operator-controlled named recording segments (v0.14.0) into both tenants (Mobilearn and Medilearn), with an optional full-day backup log written on Leave.

Decisions

Chose the "Start/Stop plus leave-backup" model and recommended it to Hasmukh. Reasoning: forgetting to Stop before a break only adds recoverable noise, but forgetting to Start a session loses that data permanently. So named segments are the primary deliverable, and a complete full-day log is still written automatically on Leave as a safety net, gated by a checkbox (keepFullLog, default on, persisted to localStorage).
Recording governs only which transitions land in a named log file. Notifications, the participant list and the broadcast overlay stay independent of recording state. Snooze already handles muting banners during breaks.
Seed the log at join, and at each segment start, with whoever is already on camera. This makes per-session camera-on totals accurate, and also fixes a latent gap where someone on the whole time but never toggling counted as zero.
Keep both tenants in lockstep. The regions of renderer.js that were edited were byte-identical between tenants (only the join-tier chain and the OAuth banner text differ), so the same edits applied cleanly to both. styles.css was copied across verbatim.
Left the stray root-level Zoom Companion/renderer.js untouched. It is a duplicate that is not bundled, since the build glob is renderer/**/*.
Did not build the DMGs yet. Awaiting Hasmukh's choice of which tenant to build. Did not touch the session-log publish queue this session.

Changes made

renderer/renderer.js (both tenants): new segment state variables. Parametrised buildLogText, buildLogCsv, buildLogHtml and computeTotals over an entries array. Renamed and generalised writeSessionLog to writeLog(entries, {label, startedAt, endedAt}), plus a sanitizeLabel slug helper. New startRecording, stopRecording, updateRecordingStatus, resetRecordingState, enableRecordingUI and fmtElapsed functions. New DOM refs and keepFullLog localStorage persistence. Join now seeds the full-day log and enables the recording UI. render() calls updateRecordingStatus(). Leave finalises any in-progress segment first, then writes the optional full-day backup.
renderer/index.html (both tenants): new #recording card between the join form and the grid, with a log-name input, the Start/Stop button, a live status line and the full-day-backup checkbox.
renderer/styles.css (both tenants): #recording card, button states and a recPulse animation. Copied verbatim so the two tenants stay identical.
package.json (both tenants): version 0.13.1 to 0.14.0.
OPERATOR-GUIDE.md and OPERATOR-GUIDE.html (both tenants): new "3a. Recording named per-session logs" step, the reports section updated for the name slug and the save-on-Stop-or-Leave behaviour, and all version references bumped.
CLAUDE.md (both tenants): version header, the session-log gotcha (now "Session log plus named recording segments") and the file map updated.
DEVLOG.md (both tenants): new dated entry. The Medilearn entry points at the Mobilearn one as the fuller cross-machine record.

Verification

Both renderers pass node --check. Both tenants at 0.14.0 and in parity: identical styles.css, equal counts of the new symbols, the recording card present in both index.html files, and no stale writeSessionLog calls remaining.
Ran a standalone simulation of the all-day scenario (seed at start, a session, a break, then the next session). Asserted that per-segment totals are correct, break noise is excluded from the segments, and the full-day backup contains everything. All assertions passed.

Follow-ups

Live-test in a real all-day meeting. Start and Stop a couple of named segments across a break and confirm: each named log excludes the break, per-segment camera-on totals are correct, the full-day backup on Leave contains everything, and the live timer and "N changes logged" counter update.
Build and ship both DMGs (v0.14.0). Asar-verify that the #recording markup and the writeLog code made it into the bundle before distributing, per the v0.13.1 iCloud-rollback lesson.
Minor cosmetic: the per-row "was on for" note on an off event inside a segment reflects the participant's full-day on-span, not the time since segment start. The totals are correct, so this was left as-is because the note is still truthful.
Separate housekeeping, not done this session: four session logs are queued for publishing to documentation.mobilearn.africa.

Update, later same session: join regression found and fixed

Hasmukh installed the first v0.14.0 Medilearn DMG and reported that entering the meeting credentials and clicking Join did nothing, on a meeting that joined fine before the update.
Root cause: the new recording code called enableRecordingUI(false) at module-load time, but that function reads the isJoined variable, which is only declared about 65 lines further down. This is a JavaScript temporal-dead-zone error (ReferenceError: Cannot access isJoined before initialization), thrown while the script is still loading. It killed the whole renderer before the Join button's click handler was attached, so the button was inert.
The earlier checks missed it because node --check only validates syntax and the totals simulation never loaded the real module.
Fix: moved the initial enableRecordingUI(false) call to the bottom of the file, next to init(), after the state variables are declared. Left a NOTE comment at the old location warning not to move it back.
Tested properly this time: built a load harness that stubs the DOM, electron and the Zoom SDK and then requires the real renderer. It reproduced the crash in both tenants, and confirms a clean load after the fix. Ran it against the renderer extracted from inside each rebuilt app.asar, not just the source, so the shipped bundle is verified.
Both DMGs rebuilt (exit 0) and re-verified. Lesson noted in DEVLOG: add a real module-load smoke test to the release flow, since node --check does not catch load-order errors.

Update, second regression: recording card was hidden by the Zoom popup killer

After the join fix, the bot joined fine (59 participants showing) but the recording card still did not appear.
Cause: the app has an aggressive Zoom popup killer that hides any element not on an allowlist, and also hides anything whose text contains a hint word. The hint list includes the word recording. The new card, which says Start recording log and Not recording, matched that hint and was not on the allowlist, so the startup sweep hid it.
Fix: added section#recording to the killer's protected-ancestor allowlist (which shields the whole card and its children), and added the recording control ids to the id allowlist. Kept the recording text hint so Zoom's real recording-disclosure popups are still blocked.
Verified by extracting the actual killer function from inside each rebuilt app bundle and asserting the card is shown while genuine Zoom popups are still hidden. Both DMGs rebuilt again (15:01) and bundle-verified for both loading and the killer behaviour.
Net: three builds this session. The current shipped DMGs are the 15:01 builds, which both join and show the recording card.
Action for Hasmukh: reinstall the 15:01 Medilearn DMG. The Join button works and the recording card is visible once joined.