CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2024 - E2460 Mentor-Meeting Management

Background

Expertiza is an open-source course management web application, that is maintained by students and teaching staff across NC State and other universities. Specifically, Expertiza is used as a platform to help students learn how to work collaboratively on large Object Oriented Programming Assignments. If you would like to learn more about Expertiza, please check the Expertiza wiki[1], or the GitHub page [2]. For our project in particular, we were tasked with improving the mentor management system within Expertiza.

What is a Mentor?

On Expertiza some users are known as mentors. These mentors can both be added to teams manually and automatically assigned if the assignment moderator chooses to select an option where mentors are automatically assigned to teams above 50% capacity. In practice, this means that if you have a max team size of 3, and 2 teammates have been added to team X then team X will automatically be given a mentor.

Problem Statement

The problem we have been faced with is multifaceted. First, we found that when teams are automatically built, students are not getting notified of when they are added to a team. Even more alarming is that when mentors are being added to teams, they aren't getting any type of specialized notification letting them know. Mentors should know when they are mentoring a new team, and students should know when they've been added to a team. Team listing should be improved to be sortable by team name, mentor name, or meeting date.

Expertiza doesn’t know when mentors met with teams, so there would have to be text fields where this information could be entered.

The page would have to be accessible to all mentors and course instructors, but a mentor could only enter meetings for the teams they mentored (except that the instructor could edit any of the meeting dates for any mentor).

Our project sought to fix these issues.

Tasks

Email Notifications

1. Changed mailer function for team addition confirmation
2. Add HTML partials for dual role
3. Correct mailer function calls when users/mentors are added
4. Add tests

Mentor Meeting Management

1. Create a view showing teams, members, and mentors, with meeting date fields.
2. Add input fields for each team where mentors and instructors can enter new, view, edit dates when mentor meetings were conducted.
3. Instructors can edit all dates for mentor meetings regardless of the team.
4. Mentors can also edit dates but only for the team they are mentoring.
5. Add more than three dates for the mentor meetings easily by pressing the + icon at the end of the view.
6. The meeting dates should not be editable for teams having capacity less than 50%.

Backend Controller Updates

1. Implement a new controller to handle CRUD operations for mentor meetings
2. Update models to manage mentor meetings and trigger notifications.

Implementation

Mentor Meeting Management

Code Changes in Views

_team.html.erb

We reinstituted some of what the previous group did from their pull request to render a new view, refactoring to improve clarity.

We then added on top of it the conditionals requested of us by our scope. The view code below accomplishes most of the prompt's points.

• Establishes mentor and instructor functionality to add/edit meeting dates for their teams/all teams accordingly
• Disables the date field for under capacity teams
• Includes a button to add and remove meeting dates
• includes join functionality for under capacity teams

This final bit of code in the _team viewfinishes up coverage for dynamically adding meeting dates with the "+" button

Code Changes in Controllers

mentor_meeting_controller.rb

Made modifications to add the private parameters to be passed through the model.

Code Changes in Test

mentor_management_spec.rb

The previous groups covered much of the testing pretty thoroughly aside from confirming that a mentor is not auto assigned when auto_assign_mentor is false. This is just a tag along to the existing codebase.

Backend Controller Updates

Code changes in the controller We added a new controller(mentor_meeting.rb) to perform the CRUD operations on the mentor meeting table. Implemented the necessary actions (get_dates, add_date, edit_date, delete_date) in the MentorMeetingController.

Created a new file, mentor_meeting_notifications.rb Added the subscription code in that initializer file. This file allows subscription to the notifications, which will allow handling of any follow-up actions (logging and emails) when meetings are created, updated, or deleted.

Controller Tests Created a new file, mentor_meeting_controller_spec.rb, in the spec/controllers directory to test the MentorMeetingController

Model (Validation Updates) The MentorMeeting model was updated with basic validations to ensure that required fields (team_id and meeting_date) are present. Validations for team_id and meeting_date ensure data integrity when saving a meeting.

Triggering Notifications Updated the add_date method to trigger a notification after successfully creating a meeting. Notifications triggered via ActiveSupport::Notifications.

Helper code We also wrote a helper code to map all the team IDs in the mentor meeting table to the appropriate meeting dates.

Relevant Links

• Github Repository: https://github.com/ExtremeMachine12/expertiza
• Pull Request: https://github.com/ExtremeMachine12/expertiza/pull/21

Team

Mentor

• Nainisha Bhallamudi

Members

• Anusha Akkireddy (aakkire)
• Simon Getahun (sgetahu)
• Gavin Teague (gwteague)