CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2015 E1584 Send Feedback to Support

E1584. Send Feedback to Support

This is the design document for the Feedback to Support feature of Expertiza.

Introduction

Expertiza is a web application where students can submit and peer-review learning objects (articles, code, web sites, etc). It is used in select courses at NC State and by professors at several other colleges and universities. <ref>Expertiza on GitHub</ref>

Problem Statement

The objective of this project is to allow Expertiza users to directly send their issues to Expertiza support team via a support form. Currently there is no support feature and the problems are passed on to the support team via instructors. The aim of this feature is faster resolution of the problems which are faced by the users. This feature should be available to all registered users of Expertiza. The users will be able to use it even when they are not logged in. Moreover, it should allow users to send screenshots of their issues. Apart from the feedback form, a view for the support team is also required. This view would contain a collective list of all the problems and the support person would be able to change the status of the problems.

Design Specification and Mock Ups

User related specifications

• The link to Support should be present in the footer. This should help facilitate feedback from un-logged users.

• Clicking on "Contact Support" should open a new page rather than a pop-up or modal dialog box.

• The feedback form should consist of the following fields: Email, Name (optional), Title, Description (optional), Attachments (optional) and CAPTCHA.

• The feedback should go expertiza-support@lists.ncsu.edu.

• Users should send feedback using their own email-ids. Thus, if a logged-in user opens the feedback form, then the user's email-id will be automatically filled (and which cannot be edited).

• The title field should have a maximum of 160 characters.

• Users should should have the facility to upload only one file in their feedback.

• The uploaded file should be either in .pdf or .png/.jpg format. Moreover, the extension list should not be hard-coded. A white-list of the extensions supported should be present in the database.

• The size of the uploaded file should not exceed 2MB.

• To avoid attacks, the feedback form should contain a CAPTCHA.

• There should be a separate method that keeps a check on multiple requests. An algorithm should be implemented to add incremental delay between consecutive requests after three trials.

• If the user is not logged-in, then the following error message should be displayed for invalid email-id: "Invalid email-id. Please provide email-id registered with Expertiza".

Support team related specifications

• The link to Feedback should be accessible only to support people.

• The feedback page should contain a list of all the issues in a table format.

• Each feedback can be categorized into the following states:
  • New - when a new feedback is generated by the user and not yet handled by any support person.
  • In Progress - when a support person has viewed the feedback and started working on it.
  • Completed - when a support person has solved the issue in the feedback.
  • Invalid - when the feedback is not relevant to Expertiza.

• When a state is changed, the user may get notified through email.

• Support must have the facility to configure feedback settings. This includes mentioning support email-id, file extension while-list, Max number of attachments allowed, Max size of each attachment, Types of feedback states, and other settings for multiple requests.

Other Specifications

• Currently, the attachment extension white-list and types of states of the feedback will be stored as comma separated values in the database.

Implementation

Tables and Schema

• feedbacks

• id - primary key
• user_email - contains the email of register user.
• title - contains the title of the feedback.
• description - contains the description of the feedback.
• status - stores the current status of the feedback.

• feedback_attachments - stores feedback attachments in binary form

• id - primary key
• feedback_id - contains primary key of the feedback
• filename - contains the filename of the feedback attachment
• content_type - contains type and extension of the attachment like application/pdf or image/png.
• data - contains the contents of the attachment in binary form

• feedback_attachment_settings

• id - primary key
• file_type - contains the allowed extensions of the attachments like application/pdf or image/png.

• feedback_settings

• id - primary key
• support_mail - contains the email id of the where the feedback is submitted.
• max_attachments - contains the maximum number of attachments allowed.
• max_attachment_size - contains maximum size of attachments in kb.
• wrong_retries - number of retires allowed before the system starts blocking the user.
• wait_duration - number of minutes the user is blocked after attempting the specified wrong retires.
• wait_duration_increment - number of minutes incremented in the wait duration after every wrong attempt made after attempting the specified wrong retries.
• support_team - list of emails(comma separated) who can view/edit the user feedbacks.

• feedback_statuses

• id - primary key
• status - contains possible states of the feedback like new, in progress, completed etc.

Models

• feedback.rb - Model to store feedback. It also validates the presence of email and title field.
• feedback_attachment.rb - Model to store feedback attachments. Function attachment_type_validation validates file type and uploaded_file reads the data into binary format.
• feedback_attachment_settings.rb - Model to store file_type of the attachment allowed in the database.
• feedback_settings.rb - Model to store the feedback settings.
• feedback_status.rb - Model to store list of status of the feedback in the database.

Controllers

• feedbacks_controller.rb - controller handles the following feedback related functions

• index - displays list of all feedbacks in tabular format
• show - display feedback based on id
• download_feedback_attachment - facilitates downloading the uploaded attachment
• new - creates new feedback form
• edit - allows support to change the feedback status
• verify_captcha - function to verify whether the CAPTCHA is entered correctly
• create - creates new feedback
• wrong_retries_calculator - calculates the number of wrong attempts and the wait duration if the wrong attempts exceed the threshold value
• send_support_email - sends feedback details to support via email
• create_attachment - saves an attachment in the database with feedback_id as a foreign key
• update - facilitates status change
• destroy - deletes a feedback entry

• feedback_settings_controller.rb

• index - to display current feedback settings, attachment settings and status settings
• new - renders new settings page
• add_attachment_type - function to save new attachment type
• add_status - function to save new feedback status
• create - function to save only feedback settings
• update - function to facilitate change in feedback settings
• destroy - function to destroy feedback settings
• delete_attachment_type - function to delete existing attachment type
• delete_status - function to delete existing feedback status
• set_file_types - function to fetch attachment settings and status settings

Views

• feedbacks

• _form.html.erb - partial for new feedback form
• edit.html.erb - view for editing status of the feedback
• index.html.erb - displays list of feedbacks in tabular form
• show.html.erb - form to display a single feedback

• feedback_settings

• _add_file_type.html.erb - partial for adding new file extension
• _add_status.html.erb - partial for adding new feedback status
• _form.html.erb - partial for editing feedback settings
• edit.html.erb - contains form, add_file_type, and add_status partial
• index.html.erb - displays only feedback settings in tabular form
• new.html.erb - contains form to enter new feedback settings
• show.html.erb - display only feedback settings

Testing

Gems

• gem 'capybara'
• gem 'factory_girl_rails'
• gem 'database_cleaner'

Factories

• feedback_testing.rb - It contains factories for feeedback_settings, feedback_attachment_settings and user

Features

• feedback_submission.rb - It contains Capybara with Rspec scenarios for feedback submission by unlogged user.

Spec

• rails_helper.rb - contains code foe database cleaner to truncate user, feedback_settings and feedback_attachment_settings tables after the tests

Test result

Screenshots

• Homepage with "Report An Error"

• Feedback form

• View Feedbacks Link in the footer

• List of all feedbacks

• Edit feedback settings

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References

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External Sources

• Recaptcha in Ruby