Project: Texas Beyond History documentation
Client: Texas Beyond History
Started on: Started February 28, 2023
Completion status: Awaiting feedback
Completed on: March 20, 2023
Staff Guidance: Stacy, Marianne
Description/plans: write Git Wiki documentation to help clients use git in Adobe Dreamweaver
Check it out here :^)
This week I will continue on the Texas Beyond History (TBH) Git workflow documentation. After playing around with Adobe Dreamweaver and getting used to the Git GUI built into it, I finished the “rough draft” of the documentation. This week I will mostly focus on getting feedback and making the appropriate changes.
I have never written a Git Wiki before so to avoid making a mess of the repository Marianne created for TBH I so I forked it.
However, I also did not know that you could not merge a Git Wiki from a fork in the original repository 🙂
I decided on writing the Git Wiki across two pages
Wiki on Texas Beyond History
(in progress)
Project: Texas Beyond History documentation
Client: Texas Beyond History
Started on: Started February 28, 2023
Completion status: In progress
Staff Guidance: Stacy, Marianne
Description/plans: write Git Wiki documentation to help clients use git in Adobe Dreamweaver
Texas Beyond History is a website built on Adobe Dreamweaver that has existed for a while. It has many contributors working on it, uploading code and images. Recently, we have been asked to move the website’s contents to a git repository to store the large size files. In this project, I write documentation on how to use the git work flow in Adobe Dreamweaver.
Through out the process of setting up Dreamweaver and Git, I have been taking notes on Notion
Project: Qualtrics LTI Grade CSV Passback
Client/Prof: LAITS
Started on: February 6, 2023
Completion status: Completed on March 1, 2023
Staff guidance: Chris Pittman, Stacy Vlasits
Description/plans: Feature to download student responses as CSV file
Going back to the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, these are the changes I made in each aspect of the tool.
Controller:
Applications built on the Laravel Framework have a controller that features functions that help the user interact with the database (not directly of course). These methods can be categorized as GET or POST. GET methods or functions retrieve data from the server and presents it to the user. When you browse for something online like pictures of cats and hit search, these pictures are retrieved from servers, so GET methods must be behind this. POST, you guessed it: posts your data to the server. When you create an account for the first time, your information is sent and stored in the server. An example of the cycle of GET and POST methods is when you search for an online store (getting user interface), logging in (posting your info and verifying that it’s correct), and then seeing the items in your cart or wishlist (getting again).
The function I implemented gradePassback() is a GET method. This is the web.php file which includes all the HTTP routes. The “/” app the main URL calls a function that performs a GET or POST method. I added line 36 which calls the gradePassback() function.
These are my changes to the app controller. I used the LeagueCSV library to convert the data I pulled from the data base in a downloadable CSV file
View:
In the teacher interface, I added the button from my previous post. My first idea was to create a button in HTML and to make it redirect to /app/exportCSV I use a JavaScript block within the HTML to go to the link on click. After I made a pull request, Chris suggested that I link to the route and stylize it instead. This solution is much cleaner.
This is a sample of what the teacher side view looks like (these are not real people’s names)
and this is the CSV file that is retrieved when the Download CSV button is pressed
My contribution was merged to the main Qualtrics-LTI code repository on GitHub! Overall this was a really cool and insightful project to work on. Starting with no prior experience with MVC architecture, I learned about the framework used in a lot of web applications, technologies used in web dev, and the git workflow. Throughout this month I went from familiarizing myself with the project, to sometimes feeling frustration when setting up the development environment and figuring out how all the MVC components interact, to actually making a contribution.
This week, I continued working on the Qualtrics LTI project after finally setting up the database and web servers. After getting Chris’s approval, I came up with a simple approach.
This is the professor’s/instructor’s view of the Qualtrics survey tool. At the bottom there is a “Responses”, this is where all the data about all students’ responses are found and we want to convert this into a downloaded CSV file. I drew up this button in Figma of how I plan on implementing it in HTML/CSS code.
Project: Qualtrics LTI Grade CSV Passback
Client/Prof: LAITS
Started on: February 6, 2023
Completion status: Still in progress
Staff guidance: Chris Pittman, Stacy Vlasits
Description/plans: Feature to download student responses as CSV file
This week I started working on my first project at LAITS. Qualtrics LTI is a tool that you might be familiar with if you’ve ever taken a survey or a quiz here at UT. LTIs are application meant to be use as learning and instruction tools, another well known one here at UT is Instapoll. For this project, I was assigned to add a feature for instructor to be able to retrieve a CSV (Comma Separated Values) of a student’s responses after taking a quiz.
Qualtrics LTI is built on Laravel PHP Framework which follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. What is all of this? All websites you access that allow you to store information just as a username and password, items in a cart, or make posts have a database and a server behind them. MVC is a layout most commonly used to facilitate the development of these websites. Model represents all of data- here it would be the information to be retrieved such as the student ID, grade, and timestamp. View is the user interface or everything you see and interact with on a website. The controller is what connects the model and the view and the part of the layout that I will add to include this feature.
