Hi all,
I'm designing a system that allows students to sign up for 1:1 tutoring
sessions with other student tutors. All students should be able to see the
tutoring sessions that exist during a given week (including names of the
tutor for each session, but once a spot is taken it should appear as
taken--but enrolled students don't know by whom. Tutors on the other hand
have full view of the sessions and who's signed up for what. They're also
students themselves, so a student may have a "tutor" relationship to one
course and an "enrolee" relationship to another. Additionally, there is an
instructor who can also view everything, but cannot offer times that they
would tutor.
The crux of the challenge at the moment is just how to *model* this stuff.
The relevant bits of modeling I have so far are the following
type User
= Student StudentInfo
| Faculty FacultyInfo
| Admin
type alias Model =
{ me : Maybe UserId
, users : Dict UserId User
, courses : Dict CourseId Course
}
type alias BasicInfo =
{ name : String
, id : UserId
}
type CourseRelation
= Enrolled (Maybe SessionId)
| Tutoring (Set SessionId)
type alias StudentSpecific =
{ a
| courses : Dict CourseId CourseRelation
}
type alias StudentInfo =
StudentSpecific BasicInfo
type alias FacultySpecific a =
{ a
| courses : Set CourseId
}
type alias FacultyInfo =
FacultySpecific BasicInfo
type alias Course =
{ id : CourseId
, name : String
, instructor : UserId
, sessions : Dict SessionId Session
}
type alias Session =
{ id : SessionId
, time : Date
, tutor : UserId
, location : String
, registration : Registration
}
Of course, the goal is not to have any information in the Model that the
current user is not privileged to have. Cases that are tricky with the
above model include
- An enrolled student should see the sessions and who's tutoring them.
They get the tutor's UserId (which is okay to disclose) but they should not
have the whole StudentInfo model for the tutor in their store--it includes
things like what other courses the tutor is in and their relation to them.
- Course staff (tutors and instructors) should be able to see the names
[and, not yet in the above model but forthcoming, contact info] for signed
up students--but if possible, not the other courses that the student is
related to.
- In the model above, the Session doesn't store whatever enrolled
student may be associated with it because then anyone with the a session
record would see the student signed up, and signups must be anonymous (a
prior version had Registration tagging the registered student's UserId).
- Probably other things I'm missing that make this thorny
Kind people of elm-discuss, am I just going about this in a way
over-engineered way? Is there any way to reduce this complexity? You'll
note that I've made heavy use of Sets and Dicts, as well use union types
and carefully choose who owns what data, all in an attempt to make
impossible states impossible. But I feel that it's become too much. The
data is highly relational, and it'd be so simple to have just a few sets on
the root of my Model for UserId/User, CourseId/Course, SessionId/Session,
and many-to-many tables for CourseRelation (User <-> Course) and
SessionSignups (Session <-> User). That would also permit a boatload of
invalid states to be representable. In such a setup, the server would then
just send only the rows that the user is privileged to see. Even then
achieving the "session anonymity for enrolled students" seems tricky to
implement.
I am new to building from scratch a system with these kinds of
requirements--I would call them sophisticated, but that's probably my
inexperience talking--and am completely open to the fact that there's
something simple that I'm missing that'd make this all much more
manageable. I'd even be happy to scrap all of this if what I've got so far
is deeply problematic.
I would be extremely appreciative if anyone with some experience has any
advice for me. Thank you very much and have a great weekend!
Cheers,
Spencer
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Elm
Discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
