Research Log of Web Science Students

Usability testers for Projectrix and Hardwire needed!

Please visit these links and be nice hehe. Thanks! =)

PROJECTRIX (Eportfolio and Assessment Management System) – http://j.mp/testprojectrix

HARDWIRE (Personal Learning Environment) – http://j.mp/testhardwire



Projectrix poster draft

This is actually the second poster draft. The first one didn’t have the UP, DCS and WSG logos and some images in Software Archi and Platform Used sections.

In a previous post I was grappling with Spring Simple Form Controller’s formBackingObject() method.

I never thought I’d touch those lines of code again.

Earlier this week, Dan and I agreed to do some last minute coding. We wanted to do the (1) default rubric feature and then a minor revision, enabling case insensitive search.

We set out to do #1 this morning. I set out to subdivide the task just like I normally would to allow for divide and conquer. After analyzing the problem, there were three tasks to do. The first task was easy. Dan was able to do it in no time. The second and third tasks weren’t straightforward. The former was drab and routine. We’ve been down that road before already and many times.

The third was different. The task was to add a new field to the Project domain object, a default rubric id.
But it wasn’t that simple. In the Create Project page after the user entered the details of the project, he had the option to search for a default rubric. Dan and I were at odds on how to do this. Though both of us agreed to use a Spring controller and not client side using GWT, we disagreed on how many pages this form should have. I wanted it to have two pages because I thought that was more aesthetically pleasing. On the other hand Dan wanted to put it all one one page. I can’t remember why but Dan won here.

I first followed a brute force approach to doing this just like I did before. But that didn’t work out. I realized halfway that it was very complicated and I didn’t have a lot of time. So I switched to doing it using Spring’s SimpleFormController . I was successful in the development environment but encountered problems in the production environment. I couldn’t get it to work up there.

In the end Dan and I abandoned the plan to enable a user to add a default rubric when he wants to have his project assessed. We wouldn’t be able to finish things on time and there’s a load of other things to. Might as well concentrate on testing now.

We have to revisit and edit Projects module so users can assign default rubrics for their projects. It was decided that we will remove the “Add Project” feature in the current Projects home implementation so only the saved projects will remain on that page. That page will now be “View Saved Projects” page. We’ll do another version of the Add Project feature on a separate page (“Add Project” page) with the addition of the “Search Rubric” and “Assign rubric to project” features.