Course survey upload failure (fa18 data)

[jameslzhu]

mowen's been getting two errors while uploading course survey data for fa18.

There are two separate issues here:

"Instructor save failed: #<Instructor id: 5950, last_name: "Lin", picture: "", title: "Teaching Assistant", phone_number: "", email: "kevinlin@gmail.com", home_page: "", interests: "", created_at: "2011-04-15 23:29:06", updated_at: "2011-04-15 23:29:06", private: false, office: "", first_name: "Kevin">"

There are two Kevin Lins in the database. This is somehow causing an error to be thrown at csec_admin_helper.rb#L133, because Instructors are only disambiguated by first,last name, and not id.

"Could not find survey question 'Response Rate' in database"

There is an extra data point in this semester's survey, 'Response Rate'. This extra SurveyQuestion is not an entry in the database, so the lookup fails and an error is thrown at csec_admin_helper.rb#L108

[jameslzhu]

In the future, for distinguishing instructors with identical first/last names, lacking further disambiguation (student IDs, internal survey IDs, semester heuristics), we should default to the most-recently-created instructor, or maybe instructor with the most recent course survey data (favoring instructors who last taught spring 2019 over instructors who last taught spring 2015).

[jameslzhu]

It appears the error is being caused by save validations occurring after instructor.save. Specifically, it appears the validation at instructor.rb#L31 is failing when Kevin Lin is being saved:

  validates_uniqueness_of :first_name, scope: :last_name

Kevin Lin does not have a unique first name in the space of all TAs with a common last name (i.e. there is another Kevin Lin, so this validation fails, causing the course upload to fail.

The fix for this is unclear. It's also unclear how Kevin Lin created his account in the first place (manual intervention may have occurred), but it seems like the solution involves either:

• Remove the validation (may break other sections)
• Skip validation here, using validate: false as a parameter in instructor.save
• Add the instructor only if newly created

The third seems like the most logically correct solution. The second seems like the most practically simple solution (but the most duct-tapey).

[jameslzhu]

Appears to be fixed?