CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2017/E1758 Improve e-mail notifications

Introduction

Expertiza is a web application developed using Ruby on Rails that serves as a peer-review system. The application allows students to submit and peer-review learning objects (articles, code, web sites, etc)[1][2]. It is an open source project and it's codebase is maintained in GitHub. We are contributing to Expertiza as a part of our Object-Oriented Design and Development's Open-Source Software (OSS) Project. Our goal in this project is to fix various issues related to staggered deadlines for assignments. A staggered-deadline assignment is an assignment in which different topics have different deadlines. In this Wiki Page, we will explain the changes that we have made for the same.

Changes To Be Implemented

• What’s wrong:

When students' accounts are created by importing a CSV file on the Users page, they receive e-mails with their user-ID and password. But if an account is created by adding them as participants to an assignment when they don't already have an account, e-mail is not sent. Students should receive e-mails upon account creation, regardless of how their account is created. So this involves adding a call to the e-mailer … or, perhaps, moving an email call from the Users controller to the point where an account is actually created.

Second, evidently if a submission is revised after review, the system e-mails the reviewer saying to revise the review. This is just fine ... except if the last round of review is in progress.The message telling reviewers to revise their reviews should not be sent after the last review deadline has passed. It would also be nice to fix the message so it tells which review (Review 1, Review 2, etc.) has been revised, and gives the reviewer a link directly to it.

• There are also other circumstances when it would be helpful to send mail.

Send out an email to the invitee when a participant sends out an invitation to another participant to join a team.

The student who issued the invitation should also be e-mailed when the invitee joins the team. And also when a student responds to a teammate advertisement. In general, all activity on ad responses and invitations should be reported to the other party by e-mail (unless these e-mails are turned off in a (new) profile field).

Notify an instructor by e-mail when a student suggests a topic.

Modified Files

• app/controllers/invitations_controller.rb
• app/controllers/submitted_content_controller.rb
• app/controllers/suggestion_controller.rb
• app/mailers/mailer.rb
• app/models/assignment.rb
• app/models/assignment_participant.rb
• app/models/course_participant.rb

Added Files

• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_invite_html.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_invite_plain.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_welcome_html.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_welcome_plain.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/send_mail_to_instructor.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/send_mail_to_instructor.text.erb

• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_accept_html.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_accept_plain.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_decline_html.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_decline_plain.html.erb

Approach Taken To Implement Changes

NOTE: All the mails except the ones for the reviewer which are sent to mailinator , are sent to expertiza.development@gmail.com ,as this is already set in the development environment.

1) Initially the email were being sent to users when they were added using a CSV file on the users page only . Now we added a method in the assignment_participant.rb model to send mails when a participant is added to an assignment on the assignment page through a CSV file.

def self.import(row, _row_header = nil, session, id)

   raise ArgumentError, "No user id has been specified." if row.empty?
   user = User.find_by_name(row[0])
   if user.nil?
     raise ArgumentError, "The record containing #{row[0]} does not have enough items." if row.length < 4
     attributes = ImportFileHelper.define_attributes(row)
     user = ImportFileHelper.create_new_user(attributes, session)
   end
   raise ImportError, "The assignment with id \"" + id.to_s + "\" was not found." if Assignment.find(id).nil?
   unless AssignmentParticipant.exists?(user_id: user.id, parent_id: id)
     new_part = AssignmentParticipant.create(user_id: user.id, parent_id: id)
     new_part.set_handle
    # E1758 Fall17 
     password = "password"#user.password
     prepared_mail = MailerHelper.send_mail_to_user(user, "Your Expertiza account and password have been created.", "user_welcome", password)
     prepared_mail.deliver
   end
 end

Also we added a method in the course_participant.rb file to send the mails when the user is added on the course page using a CSV file.

def self.import(row, _row_header = nil, session, id)
   raise ArgumentError, "No user id has been specified." if row.empty?
   user = User.find_by_name(row[0])
   if user.nil?
     raise ArgumentError, "The record containing #{row[0]} does not have enough items." if row.length < 4
     attributes = ImportFileHelper.define_attributes(row)
     user = ImportFileHelper.create_new_user(attributes, session)
   end
   course = Course.find(id)
   if course.nil?
     raise ImportError, "The course with the id \"" + id.to_s + "\" was not found."
   end
   unless CourseParticipant.exists?(user_id: user.id, parent_id: course.id)
     CourseParticipant.create(user_id: user.id, parent_id: course.id)
   # E1758 Fall 17
     password = "password"#user.password
     prepared_mail = MailerHelper.send_mail_to_user(user, "Your Expertiza account and password have been created.", "user_welcome", password)
     prepared_mail.deliver
   end
 end

2) Initially whenever a submission was being revised ,a mail was being sent to the the reviewer to revise the review. We needed to make sure that mail should not go when it is the last phase of review.

We put a check on the condition that if it is the last round of review then mail should not be sent to the reviewer for revision of his review. for that we created a method review_deadline in the assignment.rb file to check if the next due date round is equal to number of review rounds or not.

1. E1758 Fall 17

 def review_deadline(topic_id = nil, num_review_rounds)
   return false if topic_id.nil? and self.staggered_deadline?
   next_due_date = DueDate.get_next_due_date(self.id, topic_id)
   return !(next_due_date.round == num_review_rounds && next_due_date.deadline_type_id == 2)
 end

We also created a method in the assignment_participant.rb file to check if the round is valid for mail.

# E1758 Fall 17
 def is_round_valid_for_mail?
   topic_id = SignedUpTeam.topic_id(self.parent_id, self.user_id)
   return assignment.review_deadline(topic_id, assignment.num_review_rounds)
 end

end

In the submitted_content_controller.rb we created a check

# E1758 Fall 17
     if participant.is_round_valid_for_mail?
     reviewers = []
     participant.reviewers.each do |reviewer|
       reviewers << User.find(reviewer.user_id).email
     end
     Mailer.delayed_message(bcc: reviewers, subject: "You have a new submission to be review", body: "Please visit http://expertiza.ncsu.edu and proceed to peer reviews.").deliver_now
     # participant.assignment.email(participant.id) rescue nil
     end
   end
   redirect_to action: 'edit', id: @participant.id
 end

3) Initially no mail was going to the reciever when a participant was sending an invitation to another participant. We have edited the create method to put the mail functionality in invitations controller

def create

   # check if the invited user is already invited (i.e. awaiting reply)
   if Invitation.is_invited?(@student.user_id, @user.id, @student.parent_id)
     create_utility
     # E1758 Fall 17
     MailerHelper.send_mail_to_invitee(@user, "You have been invited to join a team", "user_invite").deliver
     #password = "password"
     #prepared_mail = MailerHelper.send_mail_to_user(@user, "You have been invited to join a team", "user_welcome", password)
     #prepared_mail.deliver
   else
     flash[:note] = "You have already sent an invitation to \"#{@user.name}\"."
   end

   update_join_team_request @user, @student

   redirect_to view_student_teams_path student_id: @student.id
 end

we also created two partials for the respective view namely.

• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_invite_html.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_invite_plain.html.erb

4) As there was no mailing method for invitation there was also no method to notify the sender of invitation about the acceptance of his invitation. For this we made changes in the accept and decline methods of the invitations controller.

def accept

   # Accept the invite and check whether the add was successful
   @inv = Invitation.find(params[:inv_id])
   sender_student = @inv.from_user
   # E1758 Fall 17
   MailerHelper.send_mail_to_invitee(sender_student, "Invitation accepted.", "user_invite_accept").deliver
   unless Invitation.accept_invite(params[:team_id], @inv.from_id, @inv.to_id, @student.parent_id)
     flash[:error] = 'The system failed to add you to the team that invited you.'
   end

   redirect_to view_student_teams_path student_id: params[:student_id]
 end

 def decline
   @inv = Invitation.find(params[:inv_id])
   # Status code D for declined
   @inv.reply_status = 'D'
   @inv.save
   student = Participant.find(params[:student_id])
   sender_student = @inv.from_user
   # E1758 Fall 17
   MailerHelper.send_mail_to_invitee(sender_student, "Invitation declined.", "user_invite_decline").deliver
   redirect_to view_student_teams_path student_id: student.id
 end

Apart from that we created four partials for the respective changes,namely:

• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_accept_html.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_accept_plain.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_decline_html.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/partials/_user_decline_plain.html.erb

5) When a student suggests a topic initially the instructor was not notified. We created a method send_mail_to_instructor() to send mails in the mailer.rb.

# E1758 Fall 17
 def send_mail_to_instructor()
   #just for development purpose, else parameters can be passed accordingly
   mail(to:'expertiza.development@gmail.com',subject: "A new topic suggestion by student")
 end
 

We called the above defined method in the suggestion_controller.

 # E1758 Fall 17
   Mailer.send_mail_to_instructor().deliver_now
   redirect_to action: 'new', id: @suggestion.assignment_id

Now the instructor is recieving mail when a student is suggesting a topic.

We also added two views which consist of the respective mail content.

• app/views/mailer/send_mail_to_instructor.html.erb
• app/views/mailer/send_mail_to_instructor.text.erb

Testing

Our project requirements do not include designing automated test cases and writing tests so we have done manual testing to make sure that it works well. The manual testing is shown in the video.The description for the manual testing is given below:

To test the functionality regarding the first requirement we imported a csv file named test.csv , which contained the details of a student, from the course_participant page. With this import the student was added as a course participant and the mail was successfully sent to expertiza.development@gmail.com. Then we repeated the same procedure from assignment_participant page and this time also the added mailing functionality worked well.

To check the email functionality for invitations we logged in as student5001 and sent an invite request to student5002 for program 1 and the invitation mail was successfully sent to expertiza.development@gmail.com. Then we logged in as student5002 and declined the invite request and mail stating a decline was successfully sent to the expertiza.development@gmail.com. We repeated the process of sending mail from student5001 but this time we accepted the invitation when logged in as student5002. This time also the invitation accepted mail was sent successfully.

To check the deadline functionality : Testing this functionality was the most challenging part amongst other parts of testing and usually used to take around 15 to 20 minutes, and if any not successful, we had to repeat. Every time, we logged in as an instructor and then set the due dates in such a way that we could wait and perform the intermediate steps from student's part, say keep 2 minutes gap among each of the stages of the assignment. After the due dates were set up, we login from a student id and then upload link in the submission phase. We see that the reviewer gets the email as soon as review phase starts, and reviewer's email was set to expertiza@mailinator.com for development and testing purposes. Again, when submission phase starts, student uploads other link or upload a file, after it the reviewer gets the email. But if the student submits another link in the last review phase (we had set the assignment to have 2 submission rounds and 2 review rounds), then this time the reviewer does not get an email, and this is how it was expected to be.

To check the email on submission functionality we logged in as student5001 and suggested a topic test1. As we submitted the suggestion the mail was successfully sent to the instructor.

So our manual testing covers all the requirements and all the functionality works fine.

Additional Links

• Git pull link: https://github.com/expertiza/expertiza/pull/1048
• Git compare link: https://github.com/expertiza/expertiza/compare/master...pmg007:pmg?expand=1

References

Expertiza NCSU

Team

pragam gandhi
kapil chopra
kamal sharma