User:Rpothir

This wiki page describes the work on the OSS project titled E1716-Improve email notifications for the course CSC/ECE 517, Spring 2017.

Expertiza

Expertiza is an online collaboration tool for the students and instructors. It is an open source project developed on Ruby on Rails platform. It has several features that help the users to contribute jointly by creating the list of users by importing CSV file, assigning work, share the work, giving reviews, forming teams and finally notifying every action using email notifications.

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Motivation

Though expertiza is a great platform, there are quite a few enhancements in sending emails to users on the reviews, deadlines and accounts creations. So this contribution helps in learning to contribute to open source projects.

Description of the current project

The existing functionality implements the email notifications' feature in response to certain events. However, there are cases where email notifications are sent which are redundant as well as cases where email notifications need to be sent but are not sent. The current project aims at improving this email-notification functionality. For example, Expertiza uses a peer review system wherein, after the first round of submission, submitted work is peer reviewed. Using the recommendations made and the improvements suggested in the peer reviews, an assignment participant can then proceed to improve his work. Thus, a participant is notified via email whenever a review for his/her submitted work is provided. Similarly, a reviewer is notified via email when a new submission is made for the work that he/she reviewed. Now, if the participant makes an improvement in his/her submission after the last round of reviews has been done, sending an email to the reviewer regarding this is redundant. However, in the current state of application, a reviewer is notified in this case too. Thus, there are similar cases, where the email notification needs to be enabled/disabled and that is the objective of our project.

Peer Review Information

For users intending to view the deployed Expertiza associated with this assignment, the user login credentials are below: user_name: 'expertiza.development@gmail.com' password: 'qwer@1234'

The issues/tasks that needed modifications were identified:

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

2. The email message telling reviewers to revise their reviews should not be sent after the last review deadline has passed.

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

4. The student who issued the invitation should also be e-mailed when the invitee joins the team.

5. Create an option (in the instructor’s profile) to get a copy of ‘e-mails being sent to students (this is so the instructor can verify correct functioning of the system).

6.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.

Implementation

Topic Suggestion

Earlier Scenario: Some of the assignments have an option to suggest a topic to the instructor. But when a student suggests a topic, this event is not notified to the instructor leaving it to go unnoticed and the student must mail the instructor regarding the suggestion.

Updates/Changes: The suggestions controller is modified so that whenever a student suggests a topic, an email is sent to the professor. The changes made are shown below.

Updated the controllers/suggestion_controller.rb so that whenever a new suggestion is getting saved it must invoke the mailer function. This is also being done when the suggestion is getting accepted too.

The mailer function as shown below contains the to: address which is the instructor's email address, the subject along with the topic name and body with the proposer's details. This function invokes the suggestion_topic function in the mailer which send the mail.

As mentioned above the function defined in the mailer send the mail in the following format to the instructor.

The mail format and view would be

Testing: Since the process going here is a method call and mailer invocation, corresponding tests have been written in the RSpec.