CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2017/oss E1727

Introduction

This project was completed as part of a greater open source project called Expertiza.

Expertiza is a web application platform, similar to wikipedia, which offers teachers and students a way to organize for group assignments and porjects. By using Expertiza, students have the ability to submit and coordinate peer-review learning objects (articles, code, web sites, etc). The Expertiza project is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Expertiza offers several features which are useful to a classroom-style learning environment. Among those several features, this project represents a contribution to the organization of the code used for assignment signup sheets.

Background

The work for this project was completed by a group of three students from NC State. However, the project was completed according to guidelines provided by a coordinator who works with Expertiza.

Following the guidelines provided, the group worked to clean up a portion of the Expertiza project code through refactorization and reorganization. More specifically, logical code needed to be separated from portions of the project which were not responsible for containing code for the functionality of the application.

Motivation

The motivation for this project was to make the project code easier for programmers to read by compartmentalizing portions of the code to separate locations in the project according to the functionality of the code.

The scope of this project was limited to functionalities associated with the signup sheet. This meant that logical code that was embedded in "view" (a folder containing html formatting and design code) should be moved to a more appropriate location, the "helpers" folder (this folder contains compartmentalized auxiliary functions that "help" with other parts of the project).

Tasks Identified

    Documents: _add_signup_topics.html.erb, _due_dates.html.erb

• Move javascript code to assets (folder).

    Documents: _suggested_topic.html.erb, intelligent_topic_selection.html.erb

• Move logical code to helper file and assign self-explanatory method names.

    Documents: _all_actions.html.erb, _topic_names.html.erb

• Move logical code to helper file and assign self-explanatory method names.

Testing:

• Create a test file named sign_up_sheet_helper_spec.rb in spec/helpers
• Write test cases for all methods in sign_up_sheet_helper.rb using factories

Classes

• sign_up_sheet_helper.rb
• sign_up_sheet_helper_spec.rb

New Method: check_topic_due_date_value()

    def check_topic_due_date_value(assignment_due_dates, topic_id, deadline_type_id = 1, review_round = 1)
   due_date = get_topic_deadline(assignment_due_dates, topic_id, deadline_type_id, review_round)
   DateTime.parse(due_date.to_s).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M").in_time_zone
 end