VATeir Training System

[Cillian O Luing 1032602]

Hi all,

 

I just said that I'd share some of the things that we're doing in VATeir to manage training, in case other web devs are interested.

 

We have a system which allows students to submit availability. Mentors get a list of available students and can book sessions with students. The parameters of this booking such as whether it's a live session or a sweatbox one etc is selectable by the mentor, but in general the site automates many of the features (for example, serving up a list of tower positions if the student is in the S1 to S2 training programme).

 

Once the session has been completed, the mentor fills out a training report and grades the student on their progress against syllabus items. We use scribe to allow mentors to mark up their reports.

 

All notes and reports for a student are then displayed colour-coded in their training history.

 

I toyed with making the code available on GitHub and did so for a short period, but wanted the API access keys and crypto keys backed up on it too, so decided to make it a private repo for the good of my sanity. If a web dev has a specific question, send me a message.

 

We of course use SSO for user authentication (Thanks KH...) and rely on the VATEUD API to keep our users database up to date (Thanks SV...).

 

The only request to VATSIM is to work out a member's real rating if their have an administrative one. That's it; we don't bother VATSIM directly for data files or anything else!

 

Details about our system from a users perspective can be found in the Docomeentation.

 

I'd like to thank Kieran and Svilen, without whom we wouldn't be able to offer all this cool functionality to our members. Thanks guys!

[Jamie Fox 811029]

Wow, that's quite an impressive piece of work. It's no small job putting a system like this together. I especially like that you've remembered to include docomeentation as well.

 

Generally it's a good idea to avoid committing API keys, p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]words etc. Into a Git repository. While it may currently be the case that the only people with access to the Git repo also have the keys, you may find this isn't the case in future if you want to share the code with further people. This can be done quite easily by putting the keys in a separate file and using .gitignore to exclude it. It's also one of the few things you don't need to worry about backing up because they can be reset fairly easily if you lose them.

[Cillian O Luing 1032602]

Thanks Jamie. I'll change how I do this!

[David Zhong]

You'll probably want to modify and commits that introduce private information like keys, p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]words, etc. lest someone trawls through the commit history when you decide to release to public.

[Cillian O Luing 1032602]

You'll probably want to modify and commits that introduce private information like keys, p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]words, etc. lest someone trawls through the commit history when you decide to release to public.

Yeah this was the first thing I thought about.

 

We'll be migrating to our own virtual box soon which will make using git much easier.

 

Thanks for your advice David!

[Zach Biesse-Fitton]

Hi Cillian,

 

Do you have an email I can contact you at? technical[at]vateir.org is getting rejected.

[Cillian O Luing 1032602]

Nearly a year later and after many uses of git filter-branch I've managed to make the repo public. Hopefully this will help some other vACCs to implement a solid training system. We've been running this system for about about 3 years and it's enabled everyone to track progression through the training system.

 

Link to the repo!

 

If you spot a bug please add it an issue to GitHub. I can't guarantee support for the code or that I'll fix the issue, but that's why I'm making it open source so that the VATSIM community can benefit from it (if it wants to, of course...).

 

This is released with the MIT licence so go nuts. It also means that the code is released as is.

 

NB: this project was a means for me to improve my coding in my spare time. It was worth it and I'd probably do everything differently if I were to start again (on the back end at least), but my free time is in short supply despite some of the code needing a revision. This is really truly released 'as is' so play around to see whether you can get it to work!

 

To reiterate: I won't be providing tech support. Non-tech support emails regarding serious bugs can be emailed to tech[@]vateir.org and I'd be very grateful to receive any reports of them.