Project: TA-Tracker

Overview

TA-Tracker is a productivity tool made for NUS Computing Teaching Assistants (TAs) who want to be able to track and manage all of their claimable hours and the students they are teaching in one place.

Summary of contributions

  • Major Enhancement - Statistic Report Generation

    One of the key features of TA-Tracker that ties almost every other system together is the generation of a summary report. As the primary owner of this feature, I was able to integrate almost all of my teammates features into one single cohesive system. This report allowed users to have a overview of the most important data that has been keyed into TA-Tracker.

    As there were no similar system in The report feature was built from the ground-up. It was necessary for me to build an entire new set of UI systems, as well as new pipelines such that data from all over the application can be gathered in one location.

  • Major Enhancement: Sessions

    Sessions are the core of what makes TA-Tracker work. Users create, edit, and use sessions to accomplish the main goal of TA-Tracker: to manage TAs' teaching dutities.

    As sessions are used by many systems, I needed to design the Session model in way such that it would be easy for my team to both extend and use my system. This includes exposing clear extension points and APIs for my teammates.

  • Minor Enhancement: System Notifications

    I had also worked on a cross-platform notification system. This system allowed TA-Tracker to create a OS-Level notification from anywhere within the code base.

    As with my other features, the design of the notification system was one that was rooted in ease of use by other developers. I was able to do this effectively through the Singleton design pattern. This allowed other features such as timed sessions to work.

Other contributions & Team tasks

  • Setting up GitHub Team, repository and protected branches

  • Application styling & themeing

  • Managed the project by giving feedback on critical pull requests

  • Contributions to various documentations

Some of my relevant PRs are as follows: Relevant PRs: [#213], [#239], [#358], [#84], [#100], [#101], [#103], [#115], [#116], [#151], [#149]

The sections of code that I contributed can be found: [All commits]

Contributions to the User Guide

Statistics Window

Generate Statistic Report : report

(Contributed by Haoyi)

You can use this command to generate a report to display information such as:

  • A breakdown and summary of completed sessions

  • The number of hours of each type of completed sessions

  • A breakdown of your student’s ratings

Optionally, you can specify a module code. If a module code is specified, the report generated will only include data from the specified module.

Pressing the esc key on your keyboard will close the statistics window.

Format: report [MOD_CODE]

  • Similar to the Claims View, the report will only display sessions that have been marked as done.

  • Total Claimable Hours is computed using the current specified rate. See [setrate].

Example:

  • report

    Statistics

    Generate and display a report of sessions and students from all modules.

  • report CS2103T

    CS2103Statistics

    Generate and display a report of sessions and students from the module CS3243.

Contributions to the Developer Guide

Statistic Report Generation

The Statistics Window can be generated and displayed using the report command. The command is used to generate a report to display information such as:

  • A breakdown and summary of completed sessions

  • The number of hours of each type of completed sessions

  • A breakdown of your student’s ratings

A module code can be specified such that the generated report will only include data from a specific module.

Implementation

This section describes the implementation of the report command.

The following Sequence Diagram shows the interactions between the UI and the Logic components of TA-Tracker, when the user enters the command report CS3247.

ReportSequenceDiagram
Figure 1. Sequence Diagram for Statistic Report Generation

The following is an example scenario when the user requests for a report of a particular module, with the command report CS3247.

  1. The user command is first read by MainWindow, through JavaFX. MainWindow passes the command as a String to the LogicManager to be processed.

  2. LogicManager sends the command to TaTrackerParser for the command to be parsed.

  3. The TaTrackerParser processes the first word in the command, and identifies it as a ShowStatisticCommand.

  4. TaTrackerParser creates a ShowStatisticCommandParser object and passes the command argument CS3247 to the ShowStatisticCommandParser object.

  5. The ShowStatisticCommandParser stores the target module, CS3247, in a ShowStatisticCommand object and this command object is returned all the way back to the LogicManager.

  6. LogicManager executes the ShowStatisticCommand, which creates and return a StatiscCommandResult. This command result is returned by LogicManager to MainWindow

  7. MainWindow detects that the command result is of type StatisticCommandResult, and prepares the StatisticWindow by creating a Statistic object that retrieves data necessary for generating the report, from ReadOnlyTaTracker.

  8. The data is then processed further by Statistic. This includes computing the total number of sessions per session type and sorting the students by rating.

  9. A StatisticWindow object is now created by MainWindow. The Statistic object is passed into the constructor of StatisticWindow.

  10. Finally, StatisticWindow updates its FXML elements and is shown to the user.

System Notification - Ready for Use

(Contributed by Haoyi)

Overview

TA-Tracker supports a cross-platform OS-level notification system. Notifications can be triggered from anywhere within TA-Tracker’s code base. This feature can be used to implement time-based features in V2.0.

Usage

Notifications can be triggered via the Notification class. For example:

Notification.sendNotification("TA Tracker", "You have a consultation scheduled in 15 minutes!", TrayIcon.MessageType.INFO);

On MacOS, the following notification will be triggered.

MacOSNotification
Figure 2. An Example TA-Tracker Notification on MacOS
Implementation

Notifications are implemented with Java’s SystemTray. A SystemTray object will be created when Notification.sendNotification is invoked for the first time. In order to guarantee that only one instance of SystemTray is ever created, Notifications are implemented using the defensive Singleton pattern.

The following Activity Diagram shows an example of how a notification can be triggered.

NotificationSingletonActivityDiagram
Figure 3. Activity Diagram for Notification Singleton

The following is an example scenario when a seperate system requests for two seperate notifications from within TA-Tracker.

NotificationSingletonSequenceDiagram
Figure 4. Sequence Diagram for Notification Singleton

  1. The static Notification.sendNotification(…​) method is invoked for the very first time.

  2. The Notification class calls its own getInstance() function to try to locate an existing instance of the notification singleton object.

  3. Since this is the first time a notification has been requested, getInstance() constructs the first notification singleton object.

  4. A notification in then requested from the singleton.

  5. The singleton creates and triggers an OS-level notification.

  6. Some time later, Notification.sendNotification(…​) is invoked again.

  7. The Notification class calls its own getInstance() function to try to locate an existing instance of the notification singleton object.

  8. Since the singleton already exists, a notification is requested directly from the existing singleton.

  9. The singleton creates and triggers the second OS-level notification.