CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2022 - E2228. Refactor JavaScript on Expertiza

Problem Statement

Refactor JavaScript on Expertiza for but not limited to the Assignment View

Background

Expertiza is a software project that uses peer review to produce reusable learning items. It also allows for the uploading of practically any document type, including URLs and wiki pages, as well as team projects.Expertiza’s primary language for managing views is JavaScript. However, these scripts are not well structured and present a large scope of improvement in terms of code quality and optimization.

Files to be modified

• assignments/edit/_due_dates.html.erb
• assignments/edit/_rubrics.html.erb
• assignments/edit/_general.html.erb
• assignments/edit.html.erb -> 76 lines of JS

What needs to be done

• Most JavaScript functions are present as part of erb files. The erb files that use JavaScript but do not use arguments that can be accessed by Ruby code have to be extracted and included as a JavaScript partial.
• For functions that utilize JavaScript and Ruby code, we have two choices

- Refactor the existing methods to ensure that it follows DRY, ensure functions are modular and follow Single Responsibility. 
- Use an npm package called erb to inject erb code into JavaScript code.

• Optimize all the code so that they follow DRY principles.
• Documentation for each method and proper indentation is absent. Our aim would be to provide descriptive comments for each method as well as make code readable by properly indentation.
• Introduce the Single Responsibility Principle, which stipulates that a method or function should only be used for one reason and thereby increases code reuse.
• Identify and remove functions do not serve any purpose as well as remove unnecessary documentation/methods that have been commented out.
• Change deprecated JavaScript syntax to ES6 syntax.

Issues and potential fixes

1. Code comment and fix indentation

All files under consideration are poorly indented and commented. Unindented HTML code may contain bugs that are difficult to trace and make the code less readable. Additionally, it becomes hard to identify repeating codes and enforce DRY. Uncommented code makes it extremely difficult for new programmers to get hang of the application and its components.

3.

4. Isolate Javascript

For Javascript methods that do not use any erb tags, we isolate them and keep them in a separate file. This is done since we do not need embedded ruby in the Javascript function and the logic can be separated out. Performing this fix makes the code more readable and easier to handle as well as understand.

Fix: As can be seen in the code snippet above, all the javascript functions have been included in the .html.erb file. These can be moved to a separate directory, for instance app/assets/javascript/