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Josh Thoo Jen Sen edited this page May 17, 2024 · 36 revisions

Table of Contents

2019 CP3108A: Team GRADING (cadet-frontend)

The project is a combination of multiple features, distributed across the client (cadet-frontend), server (cadet) and autograder (grader) repositories.

The improvements are:

  • Editor template reset button (client)
  • Integration of new XML format and autograder improvements (client and server)
  • Refactoring of autograder (server and grader)
  • Client-side public test case support (client)
  • Grading overview overhaul (client and server)
  • Server-side pagination (client and server)

Scroll below to view the documentation for the changes made to the client.

Feature 1: Editor template reset button (Completed)

Rationale: Enable students to quickly restore the editor state to the template code in assessments.

Pull requests

Changelog
  • Added a template reset button in the assessment workspace (excluding the grading workspace and playground) to allow users to reset the editorValue to the assessment template
Outstanding issues
  • Add tests for reset button in assessment workspace

Feature 2: Integration of new XML format (Completed)

Rationale: Update frontend to support the updated XML format for creation and deployment of assessments - the updated specifications are available here.

Pull requests

Changelog
  • Added editorPrepend, editorPostpend, editorTestcases attributes to StateProps of assessment and grading workspaces
  • Added new ITestcase interface to represent testcases
Outstanding issues
  • Integrate new workspace properties with Mission Control feature to allow editing of prepend, postpend code fragments and testcases during XML creation
  • Add tests for mission questions with varying combinations of prepend, postpend and testcases

Feature 3: Refactoring of autograder (Completed)

Please proceed to the grader repository reference.

Feature 4: Client-side public test case support (In progress)

Rationale: Where intended by mission authors, expose public test cases to expedite students' basic testing of their programs - not an intended replacement for self-design of test cases, instead serving as a convenience feature by collating test cases previously in mission briefings.

Pull requests

  • Client: PR 527 (bundled with XML changes)
Changelog
  • Added a new Test case tab that parses and displays data stored in the editorTestcases attribute of the assessment and grading workspaces
    • Displays test case (function call), expected output and actual output (if ran)
    • Add new EVAL_TESTCASE action to allow each test case to be run individually
    • Updated workspaceSaga to handle EVAL_TESTCASE actions and added new evalTestCode saga
Outstanding issues
  • Add additional button to run all test cases concurrently
  • Standardise and clean up UI elements
  • Automatically compare expected
  • Add tests for test cases from different mission varieties

Feature 5: Grading overview overhaul (Completed)

Rationale: Improve the UX for graders by cleaning up the UI of the grading overview page and providing more more granular information on each submission.

Pull requests

Changelog
  • Added check to disable grading status display for non-graded assessments (i.e. paths)
  • Corrected ag-grid CSS stylesheet import and amended CSS to fix styling inconsistencies and persistent scrollbar bug
  • Collated all control buttons above the datagrid
  • Amended handling of FETCH_GRADING_OVERVIEWS actions in backendSaga
  • Added gradingStatus, questionCount and gradedCount attributes to GradingOverview type
  • Added grading status display for submissions with on-hover grading progress tooltip
  • Enabled sorting and filtering by grading status and group
  • Updated mocks
Outstanding issues
  • Add additional tests for grading overview page

Feature 6: Server-side pagination (Completed)

Rationale: Implement server-side pagination for the /grading endpoint (retrieval of submissions) to reduce amount of data transmitted between client and server.

Pull requests

Changelog
  • Disabled ag-grid's native pagination and added custom pagination controls
  • Added button to select pagination page size (#submisions to retrieve)
  • Amended /grading endpoint (async function getGradingOverviews) from using a HTTP GET to POST request
    • Pagination details, search, filter and sort details are all contained in the transmitted JSON body
  • Replicated search functionality server-side
    • Replaced quick filter searchbar with tag-based searching by name, assessment, category and group
  • Replicated sorting functionality server-side
  • Replicated column filter functionality server-side
    • Text-based column filters disabled
    • Number-based column filters enabled for XP and grade columns
Outstanding issues
  • Fix UI issue with outline CSS with :focus pseudo-selector of the page size dropdown
  • Update mocks and add tests for POST request

2024 CP3108: Grading Features team

1: Include assessment with answers in submission

Implementation features and decisions:

2: Pagination from frontend to backend

Previously, due to changes under Frontend PR 2437, pagination was done by the client. All submissions had to be loaded first before the frontend table shows 10 entries at a time - a waste of time later into the course as the submissions table increased to several hundred thousand entries. This change unfortunately also introduced major dependencies as they used the tanstack and tremor libraries that were not used elsewhere in the frontend.

This feature reverts some of the damage of the PR - it shifts work of filtering from the frontend back to the backend. The revert of the libraries used to reduce dependencies have been pursued by the Grading UI/UX team under Frontend PR 2893.

With locally-tested benchmarking, this change managed to cut loading times by about 13x (from ~30s to ~2s), and load sizes by 4100x (from the order of megabytes to kilobytes) for loading the first page.

Implementation features and decisions:

  • Limit number of entries requested by the backend by using OFFSET and LIMIT, which is calculated by the table state within the frontend (page number, number of entries per page)
  • The previous frontend feature, which showed the grading summaries for each avenger, was removed. This is because the pagination change from the frontend to the backend broke this feature as it did not retrieve all submissions. However, we discussed that this feature was unlikely to be useful to avengers as the main use case would be to ensure that all submissions were graded - something that could have been done using the "ungraded" filter.
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  • We have also decided to reduce the functionality of the search bar. Previously, the search bar was able to filter by all categories. However, we decided to limit the scope of the search bar, which can now only filter by assessment name. We made this decision to simplify the backend calls made. This restriction allowed us to greatly simplify the complexity of backend work as it avoided the need for OR conditional querying, complementary querying (filtering by values NOT equal to something), or comparative querying (return all rows whereby graded questions < total questions). This regression can be partially reverted, and will be a good QoL improvement: Frontend issue 2820
  • Other frontend feature enhancements:
    • additional dropdown option to allow the user to set the number of entries per page that they see.
    • Introduces 2 additional page control buttons "<<" and ">>" that set the page to the minimum and maximum respectively.
  • SQL queries in the backend for grading now use Ecto, a query builder library, instead of raw SQL because ...

Issues:

  • It breaks the export grading CSV function, which can only export off the limited backend queries it gets. However, we deemed that this was a minor regression as the previous export CSV function did not fit a useable standardized format. If interested, this issue is described under https://github.com/source-academy/frontend/issues/2814

3: Auto-seeding feature

Implementation features and decisions:

4: Publishing of grading feature, streamlining of grading workflows, auto-publishing

Miscellaneous (code quality improvements, bugfixes):

Issues

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