E1911 Refactor Criterion

E1911 Refactoring criterion.rb

This page provides a description of the Expertiza based OSS project.

About Expertiza

Expertiza is an open source project based on Ruby on Rails framework. Expertiza allows the instructor to create new assignments and customize new or existing assignments. It also allows the instructor to create a list of topics the students can sign up for. Students can form teams in Expertiza to work on various projects and assignments. Students can also peer review other students' submissions. Expertiza supports submission across various document types, including the URLs and wiki pages.

Problem Statement

The bulk of the code in criterion is HTML. It is the violation of MVC architecture - Model should not concern itself with how the data is displayed. This code needs to be moved to a partial file, and the partial file needs to be called in all appropriate places which call the criterion’s model methods. Once the logic for the view is moved out of the model, the model should only be left with business logic. This business logic code can also be refactored. Plus there are virtually no comments, properly comment the code.

About Criterion.rb

Criterion is one of the types of questions that can be added to a questionnaire. As of now, the criterion model holds 4 methods that are called from different places in the application. Each of these methods is storing a string value which contains the necessary HTML lines to display the required functionalities to the user. This string value is then returned to the calling methods from the respective views. This HTML string is then entered wherever necessary. This is ideally the exact function of a partial, and this page needs to be heavily reformatted to use partials instead of returning a string containing html code.

The edit method

This method is one of the several other methods in other files like criterion.rb which gets called when the type of the question being created in the respective model. In the case of this problem, which deals with criterion type questions, the edit method defined in criterion.rb is called when the question.type is equal to "Criterion". This method allows for a user to create the criterion question and enter the necessary details.

def edit(_count)
    html = '<td align="center"><a rel="nofollow" data-method="delete" href="/questions/' + self.id.to_s + '">Remove</a></td>'

    html += '<td><input size="6" value="' + self.seq.to_s + '" name="question[' + self.id.to_s + '][seq]"'
    html += ' id="question_' + self.id.to_s + '_seq" type="text"></td>'

    html += '<td><textarea cols="50" rows="1" name="question[' + self.id.to_s + '][txt]"'
    html += ' id="question_' + self.id.to_s + '_txt" placeholder="Edit question content here">' + self.txt + '</textarea></td>'

    html += '<td><input size="10" disabled="disabled" value="' + self.type + '" name="question[' + self.id.to_s + '][type]"'
    html += ' id="question_' + self.id.to_s + '_type" type="text"></td>'

    html += '<td><input size="2" value="' + self.weight.to_s
    html += '" name="question[' + self.id.to_s + '][weight]" id="question_' + self.id.to_s + '_weight" type="text"></td>'

    html += '<td>text area size <input size="3" value="' + self.size.to_s
    html += '" name="question[' + self.id.to_s + '][size]" id="question_' + self.id.to_s + '_size" type="text"></td>'

    html += '<td> max_label <input size="10" value="' + self.max_label.to_s + '" name="question[' + self.id.to_s
    html += '][max_label]" id="question_' + self.id.to_s + '_max_label" type="text">  min_label <input size="12" value="' + self.min_label.to_s
    html += '" name="question[' + self.id.to_s + '][min_label]" id="question_' + self.id.to_s + '_min_label" type="text"></td>'

    safe_join(["<tr>".html_safe, "</tr>".html_safe], html.html_safe)
  end

The safe_join is later used to return the HTML string to the calling view.