CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2023 - E2312 + E2313. Reimplement response.rb and responses controller.rb

In order to accommodate issues with another team, our team picked up another member and did both projects. The summaries of the projects are combined here to reflect that.

E2312 Reimplement Response

Summary of Changes

The previous version of response.rb was described as "a mess." The goal of E2312 was to reimplement it to follow better coding standards.

• Made method names clearer, many method names were opaque and did not properly convey their functionality. For example, add_table_rows:

• Moved many functionalities to mixins or helper classes to not violate the Single-Responsibility Principle

• Reduced usage of class methods

Functionality Moved

This section covers the functionality that was moved out of the response model.

Score Calculation

Score calculation is not inherently tied to the idea of a response. Any object with multiple scores could take advantage of a mixin that provided methods to do calculations on those scores. This created multiple responsibilities for the response object and encouraged non-DRY code. Functionality for calculating total, average, and maximum scores were all moved to a new Scorable mixin which can be leveraged by other models moving forward.

Previously that functionality was implemented directly on the response class:

Now it exists in a mixin, as demonstrated with this snippet:

Emails

The response model provided a method for creating emails. This was moved to a new MailMixin, which can be expanded to provide email functionality to more models in the future. This removed additional responsibilities to help maintain the Single Responsibility principle and helps move email-based code toward a more DRY implementation in the future.

Metrics

The response model provided a method for getting the volume of review comments on a response. This was moved to a ReviewCommentMixin as it is not necessarily specific to response models. This helps maintain the Single-Responsibility Principle for the response model.

Improved Naming

Fix instances of bad and opaque naming, like aggregate_question_score(), add_table_row(), and concatenate_all_review_comments() (which does more than the name implies).

Test Plan

Many other parts of the software were stubbed out in the implementation project in order to run unit tests. The existing test suite was run against the implementation and passed successfully. Due to the fact that this project has no front end, the professor asked us to record a video of tests being run to demonstrate functionality, which is linked in the project submission.

Test cases we made sure to cover:

Total score of a review Average scores across a review when the maximum score is 0 Average scores across a review when the maximum score is not 0 Maximum scores for a response when there are no points available Maximum scores for a response standard case Volume of review comments Concatenating all review comments

E2313 Reimplement Response Controller

Summary of Changes

The previous version of response_controller.rb was too long. It included too many functions besides the basic CRUD methods. The goal of E2313 was to reimplement it to follow better coding standards.

• Made method name to follow plural convention not singular convention.
• Moved many functionalities to mixins or helper classes

Functionality Moved

This section covers the functionality that was moved out of the responses controller.

Authentication and Authorization

There were authentication and authorization methods in the response controller. These were moved to authorization helper.

Redirect

There was a redirect function that helps redirect by params. It is moved to response helper.

Sort Reviews

There was functionality to sort reviews. We made a new function named sortReviews to perform this functionality and placed it in the response model

Singular convention to Plural convention

There were some function and classes that followed singular conventions, but were changed to follow plural convention.

Reducing code

There were multiple method invocations to set parameters (assign_action_parameters, set_content). We used the macro, before_action, so that we reduced the number of calls for these methods.

Testing

TODO