Doubtfire currently relies on external authentication providers, but for use standalone, we need an internal authentication solution. Something like KeyCloak: https://www.keycloak.org/ should interop between both external and internal.

PDF submissions with internal links get stripped when the PDF is inserted into the submission.

Ideally PDFs should maintain their links when included.

Currently broken link

I tried both the manual method and "setup.sh" to install this api. Both give the same error as follows:

rake aborted!
NoMethodError: undefined method call' for BigDecimal:Class /home/yuyan/doubtfire-api/config/boot.rb:2:in require'
/home/yuyan/doubtfire-api/config/boot.rb:2:in <top (required)>' /home/yuyan/doubtfire-api/config/application.rb:1:in require'
/home/yuyan/doubtfire-api/config/application.rb:1:in <top (required)>' /home/yuyan/doubtfire-api/Rakefile:5:in require'
/home/yuyan/doubtfire-api/Rakefile:5:in <top (required)>' /home/yuyan/.rbenv/versions/2.6.7/bin/bundle:23:in load'
/home/yuyan/.rbenv/versions/2.6.7/bin/bundle:23:in `

I wonder if anyone knows how to solve this problem?

There doesn't seem to be a docker.sh script in the development or master branch needed in steps 4, 5 and 6 of docker installation documentation. I'm happy to create a pull request once I figure out the alternative.

Hi, strictly this isn't an issue but I'm having so much trouble trying to get this to work and thought this was the best place to post.

I have the doubtfire-api up and running on a cloud hosted server. I can curl the ../api/docs and get a 200 response from the external computer. However, my issue is with CORS I believe and trying to connect to the website from a computer external to the server. I've tried with Chrome, Mozilla, and Edge browsers.

I added this to the /doubtfire-api/config/application.rb as an alternative to what was already there:
config.middleware.insert_before 0, "Rack::Cors" do allow do origins '*' resource '*', :headers => :any, :methods => [:get, :post, :options] end end

Neither what was there or what I changed it to above worked.

So when I try to connect to the /api/docs externally, swagger pops up and gives me this output only:

Can't read from server. It may not have the appropriate access-control-origin settings.

Any idea what I'm missing or suggestions?

PDF generation logs messages to cron that result in a large number of emails with little valuable or important information - making it harder to see messages of value.

eg:

2022-03-23 08:10:04 +1100,unknown,INFO: Starting generate pdf - 8560
2022-03-23 08:10:04 +1100,unknown,INFO: creating pdf for task 511470
2022-03-23 08:10:05 +1100,unknown,INFO:   Rendered task/task_pdf.pdf.erb within layouts/application (Duration: 91.9ms | Allocations: 29321)
2022-03-23 08:10:05 +1100,unknown,INFO: Running 'lualatex -halt-on-error -shell-escape -interaction=batchmode input' in /doubtfire/tmp/rails-latex/8560--3968591390589504356 1 times...
tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified
2022-03-23 08:10:07 +1100,unknown,INFO:   Rendered layout layouts/application.pdf.erbtex (Duration: 2102.4ms | Allocations: 30023)
2022-03-23 08:10:07 +1100,unknown,INFO: creating pdf for task 498504
2022-03-23 08:10:07 +1100,unknown,INFO:   Rendered task/task_pdf.pdf.erb within layouts/application (Duration: 63.1ms | Allocations: 10799)
2022-03-23 08:10:07 +1100,unknown,INFO: Running 'lualatex -halt-on-error -shell-escape -interaction=batchmode input' in /doubtfire/tmp/rails-latex/8560--3968591390589504356 1 times...
tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified
2022-03-23 08:10:11 +1100,unknown,INFO:   Rendered layout layouts/application.pdf.erbtex (Duration: 3815.8ms | Allocations: 11074)
2022-03-23 08:10:11 +1100,unknown,INFO: creating pdf for task 505280
2022-03-23 08:10:12 +1100,unknown,INFO:   Rendered task/task_pdf.pdf.erb within layouts/application (Duration: 26.6ms | Allocations: 3204)
2022-03-23 08:10:12 +1100,unknown,INFO: Running 'lualatex -halt-on-error -shell-escape -interaction=batchmode input' in /doubtfire/tmp/rails-latex/8560--3968591390589504356 1 times...
tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified
2022-03-23 08:10:15 +1100,unknown,INFO:   Rendered layout layouts/application.pdf.erbtex (Duration: 3507.4ms | Allocations: 3411)
2022-03-23 08:10:17 +1100,unknown,INFO: Ending generate pdf - 8560

It would be good to keep error and warnings being logged, but turn off info by default in the crown tasks.

I've mentioned this before in doubtfire-lms/doubtfire-web#479 before I realized this was not a frontend issue.

First of all, we really need some sort of active notification mechanism for doubtfire. Having to check it all the time actively becomes very tedious if I got a lot of units on there.

The first channel should be email (doubtfire-lms/doubtfire-web#312) since students are obligated to check it and we already have functional mailer stuff set up already. I think we should:

1. Rename the current weekly digest emails to "weekly digest" instead of "notification" in the UI. Most people don't even know what those options are for in the frontend.
2. Change the sender email address to something like [email protected] instead of impersonating unit chairs, especially given they have no control over these emails whatsoever and it's a setting on the recipients' (students) side. See: doubtfire-lms/doubtfire-web#284
3. Implement email notifications for comments and task status changes, perhaps do the checks every hour or so, and send a notification email of the status changes and new comments to the student if there is any. Don't tie it to status changes or comment submits, it can be spammy. An additional property of a task comment should be added (something like "notified"), and we need some logic to make sure the changes we are notifying originates from a convenor, not the student.

Other optional channels to consider:

• Develop an MS Teams bot to allow students to opt in and have the task changes sent to them as messages on Teams (if available from the university).
• Web Push (available in most mainstream browsers, Safari support is coming soon:tm:), it's fairly straightforward and how it works is very similar to FCM and APNs. We don't need API keys from 3rd party providers to send notifications. There is already a gem that handles all the heavy-lifting as well: https://github.com/zaru/webpush

@jakerenzella @macite What do you think?

It appears as though uploading a PDF with annotations (from a tool such as preview on macOS) strips those annotations once a task has been submitted.

I've had a couple of tasks requested for resubmission as it appears on the tutors end that I have submitted nothing.

Figured out that this may be due to OnTrack/Doubtfire removing PDF annotations and not flattening them. I don't have Doubtfire setup locally, but after receiving a couple of requests to resubmit work, I gather this is the issue.

Take for instance the attached PDFs. A teacher may ask students to fill information in on a PDF, and upload the task.
If a student annotates on the PDF (say using the built in PDF tool "Preview" on macOS, and possibly with other tools such as Adobe, although untested), and uploads this PDF file, OnTrack/Doubtfire will remove the annotations when generating the submission PDF.

Workaround: If the student flattens/exports the annotated PDF beforehand, this issue does not persist.

I imagine this would be quite confusing though for students uploading tasks where they're editing a PDF provided by their teacher, as I would expect uploading a PDF (annotated or not) provides my tutor with a copy of the PDF that is visually similar/identical to what I see at upload time.

As you can see, both are PDF files. Both are visually identical when opened up in a PDF viewer. One has been flattened by the PDF viewer and works for submission purposes (_Exported.pdf), whilst the other, will have the question showing up with no answer in the submission pdf (_Annotated.pdf) causing a lot of confusion for both tutors and students alike :)

Hope this helps. If you'd like some other PDFs to try this out with, please reach out directly.

OnTrackSubmissionIssue_Annotated.pdf

OnTrackSubmissionIssue_Exported.pdf

Issue:

Create task definition with a given due date
Request extension in one Task up to the due date
Change the due date to reduce the weeks to due date

Task is no longer valid

Feature request from @pwhunter to provide extension from approved date:

Discussion points:

• Could this provide large extensions that would be surprising behaviour?

Once a student completed a discussion comment (DC) (the purple box), the current design is that the DC will be marked as complete, and should appear in the tutor's inbox. Once they read it, however, it leaves (once it's read it won't appear in the inbox again).

There may be issues with the current implementation not marking the comment as unread, and the tutor never seeing the response, so the task remains on to discuss (because the tutor never marks it).

The change would be to have a completed discussion comment (a student responded) to always appear in the tutor's inbox regardless if it's read or not because it's an action the tutor needs to take.

When marking a task that requires to also assign a letter Grade, if you click 'Mark as Completed' but then click the 'X' (instead of assigning a letter Grade), it then doesn't allow you to click 'Mark as Completed' again unless you do a browser refresh, or select a different option and then go back to Mark as Completed.

I am getting a prompt that student has asked for extension for undefined weeks, and when I hit deny it gives already assessed error

Not sure whether this is a subjective, individual academic issue, or an actual OnTrack / Doubtfire issue. Also not sure if it's a frontend web app or backend / API issue but assuming the latter for now. FYI @jakerenzella.

Currently, the main issue appears to be that most tasksheets produce one of the following two problems: either the words in the document are rendered as a single string of characters with no whitespace, or otherwise each individual letter is rendered on its own line in a screen-reader's virtual viewer / buffer. makes for very difficult reading. The only way around this is to perform OCR on the text, which works in general but not specifically very well for things like extrapolating programming language syntax. The OCR compromise also doesn't work if documents are password protected, unless one has the password.

If a user has set their nickname and then removed it, () will be rendered next to their name in the group list page.

Currently all ids are sequential, which could lead to potential vectors for attack. Sequential ids are indexible however, which give database performance boosts.

Implementing Hashids should give us the best of both worlds:
https://hashids.org/ruby/

I have a use case where I would like to set different deadlines for a given task depending on the target grades. To maintain backwards compatibility, there could still be a "global" deadline - but then it would be nice to be able to override the deadline depending on the target grade.

Would that be an implementable feature?

@macite,

Looking at the ontrack log... I happened to notice "#<NameError: undefined local variable or method `ev_summary' for #Webcal:...>"

2a9a5e6 adds a test case that exposes this issue,

$ bundle exec rake TEST=test/models/webcal_test.rb
...

  1) Error:
WebcalTest#test_Includes_webcal_reminders_correctly:
NameError: undefined local variable or method `ev_summary' for #<Webcal:0x00005597cffeaaf8>
    app/models/webcal.rb:120:in `block (3 levels) in to_ical'
    app/models/webcal.rb:118:in `block (2 levels) in to_ical'
    app/models/webcal.rb:109:in `block in to_ical'
    app/models/webcal.rb:78:in `to_ical'
    test/models/webcal_test.rb:161:in `block (2 levels) in <class:WebcalTest>'
    test/models/webcal_test.rb:159:in `each'
    test/models/webcal_test.rb:159:in `block in <class:WebcalTest>'

7 runs, 207 assertions, 0 failures, 1 errors, 0 skips

...

We are looking to integrate our Speaker Verification tool within the doubtfire-api repository. In our research, we have found that we will need to make changes to the discussion_comment_api.rb, discussion_comment.rb and file_helper.rb in order to be able to evaluate the audio files with speaker-verification.

This will only be applied to the replies from students, as verifying the tutor’s discussion prompt is not necessary. The reply_attachment_path can be gathered and passed through to our Speaker Verification tool.

Implementation in discussion_comment_api.rb would look similar to this:

# do we need to specify this environment variable somewhere? 
# or is there a os.environ(“SPEAKER_VERIF_PATH”) func we could use? 

if SPEAKER_VERIF_PATH	!= ”” # make sure it is unset... else 
   result  =  discussion_comment.add_reply(attached_file) 
else  
    result, audio_path = discussion_comment.add_speaker_verif_reply(attached_file) 
    # bespoke method to be added to discussion_comment.py utilizing optionParser, 
    # to send python command to command line. 

    result = discussion_comment.process_speaker_verification(current_user.id, audio_path) 

The comment thread on this task for example (note the scrollbar),

...should span multiple pages. Instead it is clipped to the confines of a single page of the PDF,

Hi, I've noticed that the calendar feed has always been returning blank data for me containing no events whatsoever. Refreshing, re-selecting, messing with the other options have absolutely no effect. This is all I get from the API:

"BEGIN:VCALENDAR\r\nVERSION:2.0\r\nPRODID:OnTrack\r\nCALSCALE:GREGORIAN\r\nMETHOD:PUBLISH\r\nX-PUBLISHED-TTL;VALUE=DURATION:P1D\r\nREFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:P1D\r\nEND:VCALENDAR\r\n"

I have tried emailing the support email within the university back in 2021 but the communication has stopped altogether shortly after and I did not hear back from them ever since. Adding the due dates in a calendar manually is extremely cumbersome, please fix this asap so I can manage my workload properly.

When processing a submission, if a comment contains a non-printable character this may break portfolio creation.

Eg. Comment text: "\b"

Students cliff and astudent are enrolled in a certain unit, and are both in the same group, "A8" is a group task assigned to the relevant group set.

• astudent requests an extension on A8, and their due date gets updated,

  

• cliff however, still sees the previous deadline for A8—the extension is granted only to the student that requests it; not to all members of the group,

  

• The comments for A8 lists the extension for both students,

  cliff sees,

  astudent sees,

The email address regex for users API doesn’t seem to be working properly. I’m able to create accounts with these emails: qwertyuiop@qwe [email protected] [email protected]. I haven't tried more combinations at the moment.
The bug can be reproduced using Swagger or the follow minitest:

  def test_post_create_user_invalid_email
    pre_count = User.all.length
    user = {
        first_name: 'Akash',
        last_name: 'Agarwal',
        email: '[email protected]',
        username: 'akash',
        nickname: 'akash',
        system_role: 'Admin'
    }

    invalid_emails = %w(qwertyuiop qwertyuiop@qwe [email protected] [email protected])

    invalid_emails.each do |email|
      # Assign invalid email
      user[:email] = email

      data_to_post = {
          user: user,
          auth_token: auth_token
      }

      post_json '/api/users', data_to_post
      # Successful assertion of same length again means no record was created
      assert_equal pre_count, User.all.length
      assert_equal 500, last_response.status
    end
  end