CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2022 - E2277. Further Refactoring questionnaires controller.rb

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Introduction

This page gives a description of the changes made for the questionnaires_controller.rb of the Expertiza-based OSS project.

Expertiza Background

Expertiza is a web application where students can submit and peer-review learning objects (articles, codes, websites, etc). Instructors add and grade the assignments submitted by students to Expertiza. Students can be assigned in teams based on their selection of the topics. It has functionalities such as peer reviews in which students can provide feedback on others' work which helps peer in better developing the project. The National Science Foundation supports it.

Problem Statement

What is needed: This project builds on E2257. That project focused on simplifying the methods in questionnaires_controller, while this project's objective is to clean the code, but looking at a wider set of files - controllers, models and views.

  • Use temporary variables instead of instance variables wherever possible to narrow their scope.
  • question.rb contains a large number of constants. Make explicit comments on their usage, and remove them if not used.
  • Since a controller should only create objects of one type the questions_controller could be introduced to create and edit questions moving the logic of dealing with individual questions into a separate controller, and improving the separation of responsibility.


Questionnaire_controller

This is the main controller used to create questionnaires in expertiza, there are multiple types of questionnaires in use at the moment as follows:

  • Review Questionnaire
  • Metareview Questionnaire
  • Author Feedback Questionnaire
  • Teammate Review Questionnaire
  • Survey Questionnaire
  • Assignment Survey Questionnaire
  • Global Survey Questionnaire
  • Course Survey Questionnaire
  • Bookmark Rating Questionnaire
  • Quiz Questionnaire

We figure out what type of questionnaire the user wants to create and return an object of that type. These questionnaires have sub-items, which are saved when the questionnaire is saved. The whole questionnaire has to be editted and saved to save an individual question. Currently the individual questions save is also part of the questionnaire_controller. This controller is also responsible for creating a node for the questionnaire and storing it in file structure.

Files Changed

  • app/controllers/questionnaires_controller.rb
  • app/controllers/questions_controller.rb
  • spec/controllers/questionnaires_controller_spec.rb
  • spec/controllers/questions_controller_spec.rb
  • app/models/question.rb

Implementation

  • Creating an object of the required questionnaire type is currently performed using Object.const_get, based on user input values. This is a very bad approach (Severity: Critical) according to CodeClimate reports, thus we aim to look at alternative approaches to create an object of the required questionnaire type.
  • As discussed before try to move the save functionality out of questionnaire_controller, and into questions_controller. Call it from there where ever needed.
  • The questionnaire apparently has a lot of items and not just questions, thus try to rename the usages of questions to items.
  • The code has been cleaned many times and functionalities have been moved around a lot, which has made the code messy with a lot of dead code. Have a closer look at each functionality and flow, add comments to each of them (eg. create_node) and remove unnecessary code (eg. many constants).

Flowchart

The following will be the process carried out to move the save functionality from questionnaires_controller into questions_controller. But we will also be be using it on every other functionality in both the controllers just to make sure they are at the right places.

Testing

RSPEC Test Cases

Tests will be added once they've been implemented

Manual Testing

Testing as Instructor

  1. Login as Instructor.
  2. Click on Questionnaires.
  3. Choose a topic and create a new questionnaire.
  4. Check the save functionality.
  5. Add a new question to the questionnaire and check the save question functionality.
  6. delete a question and check if it's reflected properly.

SOLID Principle

SOLID is a set of rules that guide us on how to achieve that in object-oriented programming. Using SOLID guidelines you can avoid bad design in your code and give a well-structured architecture to your design. Bad design leads to an inflexible and brittle codebase, a simple and small change can result in bugs with bad design.

We implemented the single responsibility principle to divide the questionnaires_controller into questionnaires and questions controller thus ensuring that each controller does only one job.


References

Team Members

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