student-applications

Rails application for processing student applications for Libraries employment

A student application ( called "Prospect" to avoid confusion ) is submitted via a multi-page form. This is managed by serializing the parameters in a session, which are marshalled at each step of the process.

Each step has a view defined in the app/views/prospect which is rendered when the process reaches that step.

Setup

Requires:

• Ruby 2.2
• Bundler
• Google Chrome (for testing)

To run the application:

$ git clone https://github.com/umd-lib/student-applications.git
$ cd student-applications
$ bundle
$ ./bin/rake db:migrate
$ ./bin/rake db:seed
$ ./bin/rails s

You can load test fixtures in by using db:seed:demo rake task

$ ./bin/rake db:seed:demo

To develop, you can run Guard by issuing:

$ ./bin/bundle exec guard

Testing Setup

Testing uses Minitest, Capybara and the Selenium web driver.

Google Chrome and chromedriver are used to provide a headless browser for testing.

The chromedriver-helper gem should automatically download and install the latest chromedrive executable into ~/.chromedriver.

CSS animations and transitions cause visibility/timing issues when testing in a headless browser. When running the tests, they have turned off by the "lib/no_animations.rb" file, which is added as Rack middleware in the "config/environment/test.rb" file.

Production Environment Configuration

Requires:

• Postgres client to be installed (on RedHat, the "postgresql" and "postgresql-devel" packages)

The application uses the "dotenv" gem to configure the production environment. The gem expects a ".env" file in the root directory to contain the environment variables that are provided to Ruby. A sample "env_example" file has been provided to assist with this process. Simply copy the "env_example" file to ".env" and fill out the parameters as appropriate.

The configured .env file should not be checked into the Git repository, as it contains credential information.

Delayed Jobs and Mailers

An application submission sends an email to applicants. This email is handled by ActionMailer, using a delayed_job queue. To run a delayed_job worker, you can start/stop the daemon process using :

$ cd ./student-applications; RAILS_ENV=production ./bin/delayed_job start
$ cd ./student-applications; RAILS_ENV=production ./bin/delayed_job stop

There are also a number of Job-related rake tasks that can be invoked These include:

./bin/rake jobs:clear                                         # Clear the delayed_job queue
./bin/rake jobs:check[max_age]                                # Exit with error status if any jobs older than max_age seconds haven't been attempted yet
./bin/rake jobs:work                                          # Start a delayed_job worker
./bin/rake jobs:workoff                                       # Start a delayed_job worker and exit when all available jobs are complete

Note: Include the RAILS_ENV=production flage if you're using this on application in production-mode.

To view the delayed_job queue status, you can visit /delayed_job in the application. This requires an admin user to be logged in ( first visit /prospects to login. )

Adding users

You can add users via a rake task:

$ ./bin/rake 'db:add_admin_cas_user[cas_directory_id,full_name]'  # Add an admin user
$ ./bin/rake 'db:add_cas_user[cas_directory_id,full_name]'        # Add a non-admin user
$ ./bin/rake db:bulk_add_users[csv_file]  # use csv file with full_name, directory_id rows