Gradebook

Gradebook is an electronic grade book web application created with .NET and ASP.NET MVC framework. It is strongly backend-focused and therefore the views are repetitive and the application's overall appearance is not so exciting.

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Implemented features

• teacher, student and parent accounts
• creating subjects and assigning them to classes
• uploading syllabuses for subjects
• files for subjects uploaded by teachers
• assigning students to classes
• assigning supervisors to classes and teachers to subjects in classes
• adding lessons to classes and displaying them on a weekly schedule (timetable)
• announcements on the main page
• generating sheets of students' grades from a particular period
• periodic grade reports sent to parents' e-mail addresses
• sending text messages with optional attachments to other users
• sending announcements to parents by class supervisors via e-mail or Gradebook itself
• planning appointments (e.g. exams, homework, etc.) by teachers and browsing them in a calendar
• quizzes with close-ended questions prepared by teachers and taken by students
• English and Polish localization

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Database

Gradebook uses a database depicted by the diagram below. Boxes represent tables containing fields. A table's primary key consists of bold fields and italic fields are the table's foreign keys.

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Running

1. Set up a MySQL database server. Gradebook was successfully tested on MariaDB Server 10.2.40.

2. On the database server, create a user with permissions allowing him to create and use a new database. The following commands can be used on MariaDB 10.2.40 to create a user with all permissions:

   CREATE USER 'gradebook_admin'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass123';
   GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'gradebook_admin'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass123' WITH GRANT OPTION;
   FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
   

3. Clone Gradebook repository.

4. Open Gradebook.sln in Visual Studio (19 and 22 were tested) with ASP.NET components installed.

5. The following message should appear: Some NuGet packages are missing from this solution. Click to restore from your online package sources. Click Restore to download NuGet packages required by the application.

6. In file /Utils/EmailSender.cs, method CreateSmtp, put details of your account on a SMTP server which Gradebook will use to send e-mail messages. You can use a public SMTP server (e.g. Gmail) or set up your own one.

7. In Web.config file, find tag <connectionStrings> and <add> tag inside it. Put your database user's details in connectionString attribute:

   connectionString="server=127.0.0.1;port=3306;database=GradebookDB;user=gradebook_admin;password=pass123"
   

8. Make sure that no database with the name put in connectionString attribute (GradebookDB) exists on your database server. Display the list of existing databases with:

   SHOW DATABASES;
   

   If GradebookDB exists, delete it using command:

   DROP DATABASE GradebookDB;
   

   Database name GradebookDB cannot be taken because at the first start Gradebook attempts to create a database with that name using Entity Framework Code First approach. Also, this is why the first start takes much longer than the following ones.

9. Build Gradebook using Build > Build Solution.

10. Run Gradebook using Debug > Start Debugging. A web browser should open, automatically go to https://localhost:44304/ and then show the following error: Could not find a part of the path '<path of Gradebook main directory>\bin\roslyn\csc.exe'. To fix it, stop debugging and in Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Packet Manager Console execute command (according to link (accessed 16.04.2023)):

    Update-Package Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform -r
    

    If a message about inconsistent line endings appears, choose to normalize them to Windows (CR LF) and proceed.

11. Run Gradebook again using Debug > Start Debugging. At the first start, the application creates the database and an administrator account with e-mail address a.adminowski@szkola.pl and password administrator123. It can be used to create more accounts for other users.

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Presentation

Click the image below to watch a presentation video on YouTube.