CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2022 - S2222: Refactor impersonate controller

This wiki page describes the work done under E2222 OSS Program for Spring 2022, in the CSC/ECE 517 course.

About Expertiza

Expertiza is an open-source project based on Ruby on Rails framework. Expertiza is a complete instructor-student usage website where the instructor can assign assignments, deadlines, grades, etc that is required for the course(s) under him and the students can use this website to perform the tasks required as part of the course like project or assignments submission, forming groups and collaborating with them, as well as reviewing projects and teammates.

This project focuses on a specific feature of expertiza which allows Administrators, Instructors or Teaching Assistants to impersonate other and access their account. The demonstration for the feature is as shown below.

Problem Statement

Expertiza allows administrators, instructors and Teaching Assistants to impersonate other users like a student. This allows the impersonator to view assignments, deadlines and submissions of other students. The rules to impersonating a user is, the impersonator has to be an ancestor of the impersonate. The hierarchy of impersonation is as follows:

super administrator -> Administrator -> Instructor -> Teaching Assistant -> Student

Note: impersonation cannot happen within the same level of hierarchy. For Example, a Super Administrator can impersonate any user apart from other Super Administrators, an Administrator can impersonate Instructors, TA, Students and not other Admins and so on. The aim of this project is to refactor the impersonate controller.