CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2019 E1910 Refactor assignments controller.rb

This wiki page is for the description of changes made under E1910 OSS assignment for Spring 2019, CSC/ECE 517.

Expertiza Background

Expertiza is an educational web application created and maintained by the joint efforts of the students and the faculty at NCSU. It’s an open source project developed on Ruby on Rails platform and it’s code is available on Github. It allows students to review each other’s work and improve their work upon this feedback.

Description of the current project

The assignments_controller has multiple functions with wrong naming convention, they are classic examples of bad function names. Few of the variables names used in the method can also be refactored to make it more relevant and understandable. In addition, functions code can be optimized to ensure that it follows DRY principle. Also, most of the functions have missing code comments, which should be added to the functions.

Files modified in current project

A controller was modified for this project namely:
1. AssignmentsController

The method names that were updated are:

 - handle_assignment_directory_path_nonexist_case_and_answer_tagging
 - assignment_form_key_nonexist_case_handler
 - Handle_current_user_timezonepref_nil
 - update_nil_dd_deadline_name
 - update_nil_dd_description_url
 - assignment_form_assignment_staggered_deadline?
 - check_due_date_nameurl_not_empty
 - update_feedback_assignment_form_attributes
 - allowed_action?

AssignmentsController

This is a controller that helps instructors, TA's, administrators, and super-administrators create/update/edit/show/delete current and past assignments. We updated the afore mentioned method names to

 - nonexist_path_with_tagging
 - assignment_saving
 - nil_timezone_handler
 - update_due_date_deadline_name
 - update_due_date_description_url

 - assignment_staggered_deadline?
 - check_due_date_nameurl

 - update_feedback_attributes


The action_allowed? method was updated to be less repetitive in the if-else statement. The 'else' was removed since it was an extension to a previous statement in the 'if' portion.

There were many existing test cases for this controller. We have made sure that no test cases were violated by our changes. No changes were made to the views or model.

This is the new method created after the above refactoring:

Testing Details

RSpec

There were already quite a few test cases for the AssignmentsController. We have not added any new test but made sure that no tests were failing due to our changes. No changes were made to the views and model.