It’s been a pretty eventful week regarding the project. The team had a productive meeting on Monday evening, in which we updated each other on our progress and discussed what we’d each be working on in the coming week. This week, I elected to focus on two features: 1) the EDIT / DELETE functionality of individual test questions, and 2) a Javascript countdown timer to appear when a quiz-taker begins a test that has been emailed to them.
Despite volunteering for the JS countdown timer feature due to my familiarity with Javascript, I actually did not make much progress in this area thus far. This is mainly due to the fact that the page itself (the page a quiz-taker would be brought to upon clicking the link they’ve been emailed by the quiz-maker) has not yet been created. I suppose I could have created the view for the page itself with placeholder data, but I elected not to go through with this, as the actual page will require interaction with the database, and there is a special procedure within Visual Studio to create a new class / database entries / views using .NET’s MVC, which I need to do more research into before attempting. Our more-experienced teammate briefly outlined this procedure during Monday’s meeting, so I can consult with him when I’m ready to create the page itself.
The bulk of my work this week has actually been on implementing the EDIT functionality of already-created quiz questions, beginning with True/False questions. This required writing a procedure in the TrueFalseQuestionController to return the appropriate view when a user GETs the /TrueFalseQuestion/Edit/<number> URL, and then writing the view itself. Luckily, the main part of the view is very similar to the view for creating a True/False question. The major challenge was implementing the Javascript code that runs on page load, which examines the question passed in, and checks the appropriate radio button (i.e. True or False) according to the question’s original answer, and making sure the original question’s question portion appears in the text input box and is editable. Below is a screenshot of the view I was able to come up with:
Moving forward with the rest of the week, my goal is to now dive into working with the backend of .NET, as I attempt to write the POST procedure for editing True/False questions, such that the edits are actually saved in the database. Once this is done, I will then use that work to write similar functionality for each of the other question types.
It’s certainly going to be a busy week! Until next time…
