The bulk of this has now been done (the first four goals).
The “Proposal for Submissions” was followed pretty much as-is. The MSc submissions link will now jump to an MSc variant of the UG4 form but using the same underlying mechanism. Both handling flags can be set and materials uploaded at submission time.
The “Proposal for Access to Submissions” was modified slightly. In the end the existing “projsubs/ug4” and “projsubs/msc” folders were retained (rather than new URLs and folders being created) with the modified indexing code. Instead of passing arguments the indexing behaviour is automatically changed based on whether the current year is the same as the year being processed. If not then the old behaviour is retained. If it is then the new behaviour is followed. This new index format for the current (assessment) year is as described, except that to achieve sorting a variation of the “dotable” cgi script is used and a data file is produced instead (mapped to the cgi script by a rule in .htaccess). Some other minor changes were made also to the existing setup (such as indexing in year descending order). The indexing scripts now generate the liveroot files directly (since they have to change the name and extension) rather than via stdout. They also generate a data file into the upload directory which maps the matriculation number to the submitted folder number – this is used by Webmark (see below).
The “Proposal for Webmark Returns” was also modified slightly. The end result is the same though – a PDF for each filled in form and a data file for each mark is copied into the submission upload directory. Instead of using a cc mail alias and remctl a feature was added to Webmark to allow per-output subdirectories in the final file output path, components of which could be literal or set by the value of a form field. An additional source was added which is the data file generated by the indexing scripts above. This allows a “dynamic” output directory (which is the students upload submission directory) to be set against the additional outputs. By this means Webmark can write the files for the indexing scripts directly into their final location (and safely as it is part of the user submission process, which also ensures that the students upload directory is in place before a Webmark submission can be made). A consequence of this though is that it is no longer possible to fill in a blank form for the mark returns – a student must be selected from the drop-down, in practice it would be an error condition if not all the students are listed in the drop-down.
The “Proposal for Public Access” has not been done yet – but will be another modification to the indexing scripts. In this context they will simply produce a list of projects for all years (including the year in the index) with just the student name and project title (which is a link to the copied PDF as at the moment). This list will only include students with distinctions though (as previously described).
To clean everything up the older msc project submissions were moved from their original “infthesis” upload location (where they were mixed up with PhD and MScRes submissions) into the new “mscprojects” location and the indexing scripts re-run for the default three years and then individually all the way back to 2003. The indexing scripts were also manually re run for all the existing UG4 years.
