CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2019 - Project E1916. Fix Code Climate issues in controllers with names beginning with A through N

Description of the project

In all files in app/controllers/ with names beginning with A through N, except assignment_controller.rb. There is some code smells detected by the code climate. These violate many of the ruby/rails best practices and needs to be rectified. Our team is to fix all code smells except

• Assignment Branch Condition size for [method name] is too high
• Perceived complexity for [method name] is too high.
• Cyclomatic complexity for [method name] is too high.
• Method [method name] has a Cognitive Complexity of XX (exceeds 5 allowed). Consider refactoring.
• File [file name] has XXX lines of code (exceeds 250 allowed). Consider refactoring.
• Class [class name] has XX methods (exceeds 20 allowed). Consider refactoring.
• Method [method name] has XX lines of code (exceeds 25 allowed). Consider refactoring.
• Mass assignment is not restricted using attr_accessible.
• Potentially dangerous attribute available for mass assignment.

• Remove or move logic that should reside elsewhere, e.g. in a model class.
• Remove logic and references to logic that is no longer being used.

Files modified in the project

1. app/controllers/questionnaires_controller.rb
2. app/views/questionnaires/_questionnaire.html.erb
3. app/views/questionnaires/edit_questionnaire.html.erb (deleted)
4. spec/controllers/questionnaires_controller_spec.rb

Issues and Improvements

The assign_instructor_id method

Problems

This method had two issues:

1. Its name was misleading because it did not actually assign a value; it simply obtained a value from the user in the session.
2. It was delving into implementation details of the User class.

Solution

The equivalent logic was already implemented in the User class's instructor_id method, so calls to the assign_instructor_id method were simply replaced with:

session[:user].instructor_id

A description in spec/controllers/questionnaires_controller_spec.rb was updated to reflect that assign_instructor_id was no longer in scope.

The export and import methods

Problems

These methods were actually no longer being used, because the functionality they provided was moved to the export_file and import_file routes.

Solution

• The logic was triggered by the presence of the parameters import or export in the save_all_questions action. Code that caused these parameters to be present had been commented out of _questionnaire.html.erb and edit_questionnaire.html.erb in the questionnaire views. The latter file was no longer reachable, as there was no reference to an edit_questionnaire action in config/routes.rb or any direct references to it in the questionnaires controller itself. Thus the commented-out code was removed from _questionnaire.html.erb and the edit_questionnaire.html.erb file was deleted.
• The logic referencing the parameters and methods was removed from the save_all_questions method.