CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2016/E1662. UI issues/fixes

UI Issues/Fixes

Background

Expertiza is an open source web application developed by students and faculty members of North Carolina State University. This portal is being used by both faculty members and students in order to carry out assignments. Typically following is the workflow of the system:

• Faculty member adds students to a particular course. He also adds an assignment for the class.
• Assignment has a specific deadline, review period and final submission.
• Faculty members upload list of topics for the assignment.
• Students have to bid for the topic or they can suggest their own topic.
• At the end of the bidding process, students get a specific topic for the assignment.
• Students can form the teams by sending out invitations to other students.
• Students start working on the assignment and submit the assignment work before the initial submission date.
• Every student then gets to review work submitted by at least one team. Student submit their feedback in the review.
• Students then make the necessary changes as suggested by reviewer and submit the assignment before the final submission date.
• Students are graded on the basis of their work and reviews.

Objective

The main objective this project is to fix the issues in the current system. The current system has following issues:

• Historically courses were created without providing Institution ID. However now since data warehousing is storing Institution Id for a particular course hence even this application should do that.
• If an assignment is completed, no one can sign up for topics or drop topics. Yet a completely blank "Actions" column on the signup sheet still appears. It would be better if the column did not appear.
• Currently when admin/instructor tries to delete an assignment, there is no alert/confirmation shown. This is risky. We need to add a confirmation step to avoid losing data.

Issues

Issue#702

How was this Issue Fixed?

Capturing Institution ID

Institution and Course has One-to-Many relationship wherein one institution may have many courses associated with it. In current system while creating new course user does not have any provision of selecting Institution. Hence we need to fix this issue. Following basic changes are required in order to fix this issue.

• Ensure that relationship exists between Course and Institution model classes.

# Establishing relationship between Course and Institution
class Institution < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :courses, dependent: :destroy
end

class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :institution, class_name: 'Institution', foreign_key: 'instituition_id'
end

• Add a dropdown list in Course creation form so that user can select institution from the available options.

<!--Adding a field so that user can select institution from the list-->
<p><label for="course_institutions_id">Institution Name</label><br/>
  <%= select_tag :'institutions_id', options_from_collection_for_select(Institution.where.not(:name=>nil), 'id', 'name'), :include_blank => "Please select...",:required=>true %>
</p>

• Ensure that the id for the selected institution is sent as a parameter along with other parameters back to controller.
• Once we receive all the data in controller Institution id should be saved in course table.

 @course = Course.new(name: params[:course][:name], directory_path: 
params[:course][:directory_path], info: params[:course][:info], 
institutions_id: params[:institutions_id], private: params[:course][:private])

How to Test this fix?

• User should login to expertiza using Instructor's credentials.
• Go to Manage Courses
• Click on New Course button so as to open form for it.
• Fill up the form. you can see new field added as Institution Name. This is a drop down list which has list of Institutions.
• User has to select one of these institutions. If user tries to go ahead without selecting this then he will get an alert flash saying this is a required field.
• Once an institution is selected user can click on Create button to submit the form.
• Institution Id would be saved in database record against this particular entry of course in Course table. User can verify this by accessing Course table in the database.

Issue#316

How was this Issue Fixed?

When student open sign up sheet for the Finished projects, he should not be able to take any actions for that assignment and hence Actions column should be hidden to him. For fixing this bug, we had to make following changes into sign_up_sheet/_table_line.html.erb.

<%if !@assignment.get_current_stage.eql?"Finished"%>
  <td align="center">
    <%= render :partial => '/sign_up_sheet/actions', 
    :locals => {:i=>i,:topic=>topic, :is_suggested_topic=>is_suggested_topic ||= false} %>
  </td>
<%end%>

How to Test this fix?

• Login to expertiza using student credentials
• Go to assignment tab
• Look for the assignments which have current stage as "Finished"
• Go to that assignment and open sign-up sheet.
• You should not be able to see column Activities. If you don't see this column then the test is successful.

Issue#295

How was this Issue Fixed?

When instructor clicks on delete button to delete courses/assignment, It gets deleted without confirming it. System should ask for confirmation whether to go ahead with deletion or not. We had to make following changes in _shared_action.html.erb

  <%= link_to image_tag('/assets/tree_view/delete-icon-24.png', :title => 'Delete ' + model.downcase),
      { :controller => controller, :action=>'delete', :id => node.node_object_id , :data => {:confirm => 'Are you sure you want to delete?'}},
      { :title => 'Delete ' + model.downcase } %>

References

1. https://github.com/expertiza/expertiza - Github link for original repository

2. https://github.com/psabhyan/expertiza.git - Github Repository code for the updated code