Digital Exam Bank

[EarthenSky]

This is a big project, which requires creating both frontend & backend tasks.

Backend Tasks

• The exam bank will start by only being visible to sfu professors. This requires us to add support for determining whether a user is a professor or a student using SFU's API.

• Next, we'll need to implement an endpoint for storing & retrieving pdfs from /opt/csss-site/media/exam-bank/

  • The storing part is less important; we can omit it for the time being (until we want students to upload scans of their exams as private until permission is obtained)
  • We should limit

• Finally, we'll need to store exam entries in the database & create functions for searching & accessing them.

  • NOTE: this will require manually entering every exam into the db
  • If we don't know the author of an exam, we're not allowed to make it public
  • exam metadata will be passed as json; for testing the frontend we can simply construct some mock data

Frontend Tasks

• After the backend is implemented, we'll need frontend pages which access the api to provide functionality

  • See valerie's site for inspiration (ask someone with access to #deepexec) or any single page app that has a similar visual style to the current csss homepage

• Support for fuzzy filtering based on prof name

• Support for filtering based on date, class number, and department name

[EarthenSky]

only visible by professors

The allow option for cas authentication lets us determine which group out of a list a user is part of. Even if a user is part of several groups, we will only get the first group in that list. Luckily, we're allowed to specify mail-lists too, so we can determine if a logged-in user is a CSSS-member!

The list we should use for now is: allow=faculty,!cmpt-students,student,alumni,sfu

• This lets us determine csss-members (!cmpt-students), however it also allows others to login who may only be slightly affiliated to sfu (under the "sfu" group).

One possible danger is that a student who logs in as !cmpt-students one semester, may fall back to student another, and even alumni another! We might want to store a list of authentication methods over time for a user, so that a person might be able to have a badge that says "csss alumni", etc...

• These kinds of features should be motivated by frontend developers. For the time being let's not implement this & just associate session level at login time with the current session.