Help

The primary purpose is to register rooms that need help with exercises. It is intended as a replacement for a trash can-based system, where students who needs help with exercises would place the rooms trash can outside the door.

When we talk about a trash can being put out, we refer to the action of a user requesting help via the system.

User stories

Student

A student is working on exercises in their group room and has a question that the group can't figure out themselves. On the moodle group for the course there is a link to https://help.aau.dk/cs/alg. On this page the student can enter their room number and shortly a teaching assistant or lecturer will be in the room to answer their question.

If a question is common or there's a mistake in the exercises, the lecturer or TA's will have written a note on the page.

Teaching assistant (or lecturer)

The assistant recieves a notification on their phone when a new trash can is put out. Tapping the notification shows a page on help.aau.dk where the assistant has a list of rooms that need help, ordered by the time they arrived in. The assistant walks to a room on the list and clicks a button that removes the room from the list, walks in and tries to help the group with their question.

Lecturer (or administrator)

The lecturer hires a new TA to help with exercices. The lecturer associates the TA with their course by entering the TA's email.

Administrator

A new lecturer needs to use the system for the first time. An administrator enters the new lecturers email and sets the role to lecturer The lecturer logs in The lecturer can now create new courses or modify courses they've been associated with by other lecturers (in the case of taking over a course from another lecturer).

Development

Development server

First time setup needs to copy the backend/example.env to backend/.env

Run docker-compose up to set up the development environment. If you set your DNS to 127.0.0.1 you should be able to use the development site at app.help.dk

Deployment

To deploy what is on the master branch:

• ssh into the server ssh -J <aau-email>@sshgw.aau.dk <aau-email>@dock-help01.srv.aau.dk
• Navigate to cd /srv/help
• docker-compose down to shut down the different services
• git pull to pull in newest changes
• ./up-production.sh to up the production docker environment

Database structure

Here follows prescriptions of the datastructures. Please update the following sections to the desired structure, before making changes to the code or database.

Courses

Field	Type	Links to	Explanation
id	string		Unique identifier, assigned by the database.
title	string		Full name of the course e.g. "Diskret matematik".
slug	string		Lowercase shorthand of course used for URL part e.g. "dmat".
instituteSlug	string	Institute	Lowercase shorthand of the course's associated institute used for URL part e.g. "cs".
enabled	boolean		Weather an exercise session is currently running or not. Assistants can toggle this.
assistants	string[]	Users	List of IDs of users associated with the course i.e.

Institute

Institutes can not be edited through the system (maybe this should be possible later). For now, if additions or changes to the list of institutes are neccessary, a developer should make the changes directly through the database.

Field	Type	Links to	Explanation
id	string		Unique identifier, assigned by the database.
title	string		Full name of the institute e.g. "Institut for Datalogi".
slug	string		Lowercase shorthand of institute used for URL part e.g. "cs".
faculty	string		Full name of the faculty which the institute is under e.g. "Det Tekniske Fakultet for IT og Design".

Courses

Field	Type	Links to	Explanation
id	string		Unique identifier, assigned by the database.
token	string		The notification token itself.
deviceId	string		Identifier of the device.
userId	string	User	ID of user.
courseId	string	Course	ID of the course the user wants notifications for.

Post

Field	Type	Links to	Explanation
id	string		Unique identifier, assigned by the database.
courseID	string	Course	The id of the course this post was posted on.
content	string		The markdown representation of the post content.
created	string		Time and date for when the post was posted.

Trash Can

Field	Type	Links to	Explanation
id	string		Unique identifier, assigned by the database.
userID	string	User	ID of the user who put out the trash can.
courseID	string	Course	ID of the course for which this trash can was put out.
room	string		A short user-entered descriptor that identifies the room e.g. "Novi 9 - 1.32.44".
active	boolean		True when the trash can is put out, False when the can is remove by an assistant. We do this soft-deletion, in order to be able to do statistics on this data later.
created	string		Time and date for when the post was posted.

User

Field	Type	Links to	Explanation
uid	string		Unique identifier, assigned by the database.
email	string		The email of the user. This must be unique.
imageURL	string		An optional URL to an image of the user.
anon	boolean		Is true for students who are not logged in.
name	string		The display name of the user.
role	Role		The role of the user (admin, lecturer, assistant or student).