CSci 4657 Project 2 (60 points). Due Wednesday, April 27th at 11:59pm

Work in in groups of three or four.

Your task is to develop a web application for an online questionaire. For simplicity let us assume that the set of questions is just pulled out of the database and cannot be edited. The nubmer of questions should be 7-12. Questions are presented to users in groups. They should allow answers that are radio buttons, checkboxes, pull-down menus, or text areas. At least three different kinds must be used.

There should be at least one place where the next group of questions depends on the answer to a previous question. For instance, if the person answered that they are a current student, the next questions would be different than if they identified themselves as an alum.

Questions can be of your own design.

Answers should be validated and not accepted until problems are fixed.

People are invited to take a survey by being sent a link with a unique id number in the extended URL. These ids are stored in the database, together with real names of those surveyed. The person is allowed to submit the survey only once. However, they can stop in the middle and save, and then come back later to finish. The session should time out after 5 minutes of inactivity.

There should be a way for users to go back to previous questions and edit their answers. However, the questions that lead to different paths in the survey are not editable unless the entire survey is started from scratch.

There must be a page that displays the summary of answers to the questions. For open-ended answers there should be a link to see all answers. The summary does not correlate answers (for instance, you cannot see who answered "yes" to question 2 and "no" to question 5, but you should be able to see how many people answered "yes" or "no" to every question).

Technical requirements

• Your code must be well-organized and use good style. Make sure to document your code, including information about who participated in development of a particular feature.
• Your web site must be XHTML-valid (using strict 1.1 checking). It should have a consistent style provided by an external CSS file that passes CSS validation, except possibly some (documented) CSS3 features. The CSS3 features must work in the majority of browsers.
• Validate all form data, both on the client side (for user convenience) and on the server side. Your validation should check for length of fields (set a limit on event title length and other fields, should check that a selected date exists and that the starting date/time is before the ending date/time), etc. Limit tags that a user can use in event description. Make sure your error reporting is reasonable.
• Use AJAX for page updates to avoid reloading the entire page. AJAX must be used at least once.

Testing

• Make sure that the model, validation, and user interface are tested. In your submission explain how you tested your web site and provide testing code for retesting. If you would like to create another database for testing purposes, let me know.

What to submit

• Send me (by e-mail, CC all group partners) the location of your project in SVN; point out where the starting page is. If your project is currently not in the dungeon SVN, please add a copy of it there.
• In the e-mail please explain (briefly) how each requirement above is satisfied. For many of them simple "Done" is sufficient, for others (e.g. Ajax) explain where it is located in your web site. If something is not finished or is not working as it should, please mark it as such.
• Each group member should write down what they were working on. If you would like to mention extra effort or extra contributions of one or more group members, please do so. You may choose to report contributions in one of two ways:
  • Write it together and include it in the main submission e-mail
  • Send me separate e-mails about contributions to the project (in that case every person comments on everyone's contributions, including their own, separately).
  Choose the option that you are more comfortable with. If the contributions are uneven, this will be reflected in the grade. If there is a discrepancy in description of contributions, I will talk to each group member while going over the code, to determine what the actual contributions were.

Some helpful information

• Ruby on rails guide has helpful information (but note that the databases are on the remote server)
• You need to modify is config/database.yml file. It should look like this:

  development:
    adapter: mysql
    database: yourdatabase
    username: yourusername
    password: yourpassword
    host: csci4657spr11
  

  The database information is different for every group and will be sent to you by email.
• You will be running WEBrick server out of your rails project directory. Go to the top-level rails project directory and type script/server. You should be abel to access your project at localhost:3000. Please let me know if anything explodes.

This page is a part of CSci 4657 course web site.