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Sorting through McGill Exam schedule using a PostgresSQL database, and a SpringBoot application to greatly simplify the process of locating exam rooms and times. All information is displayed using a ReactJS application, allowing users to search for exams and create their own personalized schedule, which they can then export to their own calendar!

Home Page: https://mcgillscheduler.vercel.app/

HTML 2.39% JavaScript 44.24% SCSS 35.30% CSS 0.53% Java 17.54%
java mcgill mcgill-university postgresql reactjs spring

mcgill-scheduler's Introduction

McGill Exam Scheduler

This project is a comprehensive exam scheduler designed for McGill University, benefiting over 30,000 students. It utilizes a PostgreSQL database to store all exam-related information, a Spring Boot application to create a RESTful API for the backend, and a ReactJS frontend for intuitive user interaction.

Visit The Site

Feel free to check out the project project here!

Screenshot 2024-02-09 at 4 19 56 PM

Features

  • PostgreSQL Database: Stores detailed information about exams, including dates, times, courses, locations, and more.
  • Spring Boot Backend: Provides a robust RESTful API to manage exam data efficiently. The backend is packaged as a Dockerfile and hosted on Heroku.
  • ReactJS Frontend: A user-friendly interface for viewing, adding, editing, and deleting exam information. The frontend is hosted on Vercel.

Prerequisites

Before running this project locally, ensure you have the following installed:

  • Java Development Kit (JDK) 8 or higher
  • Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager)
  • PostgreSQL database
  • IDE (IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, VS Code, etc.)

Installation

Backend Setup

  1. Clone this repository.
  2. Open the backend directory in your preferred IDE.
  3. Configure the application.properties file in the src/main/resources directory with your PostgreSQL database credentials.
  4. Run the Spring Boot application.

Frontend Setup

  1. Navigate to the frontend directory in your terminal.
  2. Run npm install to install the necessary dependencies.
  3. Update the src/config.js file with the appropriate backend API URL.
  4. Run npm start to start the ReactJS application.

Usage

  • Access the frontend application via http://localhost:3000.
  • Use the provided API endpoints to perform CRUD operations on exam data:
    • /api/exams - GET all exams, POST a new exam, DELETE all exams.
    • /api/exams/{examId} - GET, PUT, or DELETE a specific exam by ID.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you'd like to enhance this project or report issues, please submit a pull request or open an issue.

mcgill-scheduler's People

Contributors

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Watchers

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mcgill-scheduler's Issues

McGill Enhanced integration discussion

There have been exam schedule export apps made by students in the past and while I've considered integrating links to them or that sort of functionality into the extension itself, my main concern has been around stale exam location/time data.

  • Stale data
    I haven't looked into this sufficiently but I'd want to be able to confirm whether McGill ever updates the exam time/details on the tentative schedule or the time/details/location on the final schedule which would invalidate the previously-exported exam schedule data. Any info you have on that would be very helpful. I'd recommend in general though to add a disclaimer to your site that the data being exported will not automatically stay up to date (some users might have the impression that what they export to their calendar will stay in sync with any updates on the mcgill site) and that users should always double check against the McGill exam pdf closer to their exam date.
    Along the same lines, having your site indicating the pdf from which it sourced the exam data would be nice for users with the same concern. Some thing like "The data exported was sourced from https://www.mcgill.ca/exams/files/exams/april_2024_final_schedulef8.pdf".
    If the backend could automatically pull and parse the latest pdf linked at https://www.mcgill.ca/exams/dates and update itself that would also be great.

Other than that concern, the following are feature requests that I think would make integration into the McGill enhanced extension more valuable.

  • Url param support for export page
    I like that the search page supports url params (https://mcgillscheduler.vercel.app/data?name=comp%20204) so I can link from a user's schedule page in minerva to this site but ideally I would be able to link to a selection of multiple courses and allow the user to export all their courses without having to add them themselves
    https://mcgillscheduler.vercel.app/calendar?selection=comp204,comp206,math204

  • Historical exam data:
    I'm not sure how consistently mcgill schedules exams every semester but if there are any patterns it would be interesting to be able to check the historical exam schedules for the courses you are planning on taking. As an example maybe comp250 exam conflicts most years with comp533 because it's not expected that there are any students taking both at the same time (but for whatever reason you are considering taking both). Even just being able to see whether a course has an in person exam or a take home in previous years would be useful I think. So this would be a request to be able to see historical exam schedule data for a single course or a selection of multiple courses (with an highlight of conflicts). With support for specifying the course selections via url param, I'd want to have the extension link to this from vsb. Something like
    https://mcgillscheduler.vercel.app/historical/calendar?selection=comp250,comp533

Let me know what you think and thanks for considering this

UX concerns around separating search and export page as well as friction due to delay between pages

A few different but related concerns here.

  1. The loading delay at the start of every page feels excessive. Takes ~4s to show the search bar on https://mcgillscheduler.vercel.app/search. and then there is a similar delay after every search and then to get to the export page.

  2. Keeping the calendar table on a separate page from search/add means the user can't see what courses they've previously added once they do another search.

  3. Once they've added all their courses, its not actually clear where to go next. There is a big Search button but no large button to go to the export page. The export page link in the nav bar is just an icon and it's not immediately clear that's what you have to click to get to the export page. On mobile it's hidden in the hamburger menu so it requires two clicks to get from the search page to the export page.

  4. The Calendar export window is scrollable. I think it makes sense for the search results table to be scrollable since you can have plenty of results but on the calendar export page I would suggest just displaying everything since presumably users aren't exporting more than a half dozen courses.

Suggestions:

I think the loading in between everything and the search/add and calendar pages being separate makes the experience a bit tedious. Would highly suggest combining the two. For inspiration I'd recommend the interface on this exam schedule exporter made a few years ago but no longer maintained https://myexams2.vercel.app

"Export Cal" button overlaps calendar table on Windows

This seems to be Windows specific since I don't see this behavior on Mac. Behavior is consistent across browsers (tested Chrome and Firefox) on Windows.
From a very brief google search, is seems like there might be default css differences across os even for the same browser but didn't dig into this much further
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74691327/apple-mac-computers-are-rendering-basic-css-differently-than-windows-both-usi
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24076016/css-rendering-in-same-browsers-in-different-os

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