recodex-wiki/Web-application.md

Web application

Description

The WebApp is the default user interface of the ReCodEx project. It is a Single Page Application (SPA) which users access through their web browsers. This user interface allows students to join groups corresponding to their school classes, submit new solutions and see the results as soon as the solution is evaluated by the backend. Teachers can manage their groups by adding and removing students, assigning exercises and examining the automatically evaluated solutions of their students and their total score gained throughout the semester.

The actions performed by the user are sent to the API server over the HTTPS protocol and the web application does not modify the database or access files on their server directly and all the inputs sent from the web application are additionally validated on the API server.

The WebApp is written in ECMAScript (often referred to as JavaScript) and HTML5. The React library developed by Facebook is used to manage the user interface and the Redux framework created by Dan Abramov is used to manage the application state. Both of these frameworks are industry standards used in production by many companies worldwide. Many other smaller libraries and components are used, notably the Immutable.js and Format.js by Yahoo via redact-intl integration library.

Multiplatform approach

Since the runtime environment of WebApp is the user's web browser it does not need any installation on the enduser's device and does not require any particular platform or non-standard software installed on the user's device. This application is designed and implemented in a way which should be suitable for modern web browsers on both desktop and mobile devices.

Architecture

The whole project is written using the next generation of JavaScript referred to as ECMAScript 6 (also known as ES6, ES.next, or Harmony). Since not all the features introduced in this standard are implemented in today's modern web browsers (like classes and spread operators) and hardly any are implemented in older versions of web browsers which are currently still in use, the source code is transpiled into the older standard ES5 using Babel.js transpiler and bundled into a single script file using the webpack moudle bundler. The need for a transpiler also arises from the usage of the JSX syntax for declaring React components. To read more about these these tools and their usage please refer to the installation section. The whole bundling process takes place at deployment and is not repeated afterwards.

Routing and server side rendering

The routing mechanism uses the react-router and react-router-redux libraries. The routing mechanism works both on the server and the client.

The routes are defined in the /src/pages/routes.js file.

Server rendering and the 'loadAsync' convention

The server matches the URL of the request with the router and pre-renders the contents of the page. The components, which are selected by the router based on the URL, are given the parameters and are attached to the component tree.

The server script examines all the components matched with the route and looks for a static function called loadAsync and if it is found, it will be executed with the params extracted from the URL, the store's dispatch method and the ID of the logged in user if he is logged in. It is expected that this function will return an instance of Promise. Server then waits until all the promises are resolved and only after then it goes on and sends a HTTP response to the client.

Client

Each time the user clicks on a link to a different location of the application the page is not reloaded but the router rather changes the location of the browser to the new URL and replaces the components in the component tree with the ones matched against the new URL the same way the server did. Components should call the loadAsync methods themselves in their lifecycle methods.

Redux middleware and helpers

The redux store is extended with several middlewares - redux-thunk, redux-promise-middleware, router middleware, accessTokenMiddleware, and apiMiddleware.

apiMiddleware

The API middleware catches all the CALL_API actions and turns them into a HTTP request via the fetch API. The middleware deeply converts data in the body part of the request to FormData and sets correctly the headers and creates endpoints for the API server before each request is sent. The middleware also handle the responses - converts them to the format expected by the reducers and catches requests' failures.

accessTokenMiddleware

Access token middleware stores and keeps the access token once the user authenticates and receives a token from the API server. The middleware listens for dispatched API actions and inserts the token to the request automatically.

Modules

Modules (sometimes called "ducks") contain a reducer and related action types and action creators. There are many separate reducers and actions for each individual resource and task to make the store tree as flat as possible. Vast majority of the modules is derived from the resource manager and are very similar to each other. Modules are placed in the /src/redux/modules directory.

Selectors

Selectors are used from the containers to return a specific information from the global redux state. It would be very inconvenient if the containers needed to know the whole structure of the state, so they can rely on the functions provided by the selectors for each module. The reselect library is used for creating efficient selectors. Selectors are placed in the /src/redux/selectors directory.

Resource manager

The resource manager is a set of factory functions which was created to extract the repeating functionality of obtaining and managing the loading phases of a resource or multiple resources at once.

The factory methods create the reducer, action types, and action creators. It strongly relies on the redux-promise-middleware. It was inspired by the Reddit API example from the Redux library official website.

Resource manager is placed in the /src/redux/helpers/resourceManager directory.

Declarative UI components

The implementation of WebApp is split across more than a hundred small components which are composed together. There are two basic types of React components - presentational and stateful components.

• Presentational components are in fact pure functions which yield their output based solely on the input props and application's context (e. g. current language has effect on URLs). These components are preferred and should be as simple as possible. These components are placed in the subfolders of src/components directory.

• Stateful components are connected to the redux store and yield information based on the either the props and context, but also on the current state of the application. These components are more complicated and often make use of React's components' life cycle methods. Stateful components are often referred to as containers and the source code files are placed in a separate directories called src/containers and src/pages.

  • There is no technical difference between containers and pages. Pages are used as "root" components for different pages and are registered in the app's router.

As was mentioned earlier in the text, there is over a hundred components in the whole application and most of them are very simple. Some of the most important and widely used components are described in the following paragraphs.

App

App container is meant to be the root of the react-router tree. It checks whether a user is logged in and loads his profile and settings from the API. App container also handles access token refreshing.

LayoutContainer

LayoutContainer handles the dependency injection of the localized links based on the current language stated in the URL. It also controls the state of the sidebar - collapsing and showing the sidebar.

Layout, Header, Sidebar, Footer

The Layout, Header, Header, and Sidebar components hold the main HTML structure of the page which is displayed to the user and hold links to different parts of the application.

PageContent

The PageContent component holds the main content of a page with the common structure for all pages - the title, description, breadcrumbs,, content. The component passes the title and description to the Helmet library which reflects these into the <head> section of the HTML document.

ResourceRenderer

ResourceRenderer component is given a resource managed by the resourceManager as a prop and displays different content based on the state of the given resource - still loading, loading failed, fully loaded.

Passing content for the loading and failed states though props is optional; however, the content for the loaded state is required and must be passed as a child to the ResourceManager.

Multiple resources can be passed as an array to the component and it will wait in the loading state until some of the resources are still loading. If one of the resources fails to load the component will switch to the failed state. When all the files are fully loaded then the component displays the content for the loaded state.

It is worth mentioning that the component is completely stateless and "switching of the states" is the effect of several renderings of the component over time.

Page

Page combines the two previously described components, since they are often used together for displaying a page content which is dependant on a resource.

Pages

The main pages of the application are placed in the /src/pages/ directory. These pages are referenced from the router and are responsible mainly for initiating loading of the main resources when the component will be mounted to the DOM.

EvaluationProgressContainer

CommentThreadContainer

CommentThreadContainer can be used on any page of the webapp to create a discussion thread. A unique identification must be assigned to every thread so the comments in the distinct threads do not interleave.

Bootstrap and AdminLTE theme

The UI of the application is built using the stylesheets from the Bootstrap framework from Twitter and the AdminLTE theme from Abdullah Almsaeed. None of the JavaScript plugins from these libraries is used.

A package react-bootstrap is used. Components specific to the AdminLTE theme are implemented and stored in the src/components/AdminLTE folder and its subfolders.

Box, FormBox

Box is a frequently used component for bounding other components like text paragraphs or tables inside. It is in fact a re-styled Panel component from Bootstrap. It can be collapsable and can be displayed in different colors and types. FormBox is just a wrapper of Box adjusted for holding forms inside of the body.

CommentThread

CommentThread component is used directly by the earlier described CommentThreadContainer and uses the HTML markup introduced by the theme author to achieve nice comment threads.

Avatar, LoadingAvatar, FailedAvatar

Avatar component is used on many places for displaying a round profile picture of a user. LoadingAvatar and FailedAvatar are used to mock the visual appearance of the avatar while the image is being downloaded or if the download failed for some reason.

Icons

The free FontAwesome icon pack is used in the application via the react-fontawesome library. Many types of icons are defined as components (e. g. LoadingIcon, WarningIcon, SuccessIcon, DeleteIcon, and many others) to be used throughout the application so the same symbols are used for the same purposes.

Forms

The redux-form library is used for the management of forms' states. Several of the implemented components can be used as form fields, namely the CheckboxField, MarkdownTextAreaField, SourceCodeField, DatetimeField, TabbedArrayField, LanguageSelectField, and a few others.

Localization and globalization

The whole application is prepared for localization. All the text can be exported from the user interface and translated into several languages. The numbers, dates, and time values are also formatted with respect to the selected language. The react-intl and Moment.js libraries are used to achieve this.

All the strings can be extracted from the application using a command:

$ npm run exportStrings

This will create JSON files with the exported strings for the 'en' and 'cs' locale. If you want to export strings for more languages, you must edit the /manageTranslations.js script. The exported strings are placed in the /src/locales directory.

Configurable items

Description of configurable options. Bold are required values, optional ones are in italics.

• NODE_ENV -- mode of the server
• API_BASE -- base address of API server, including port and API version
• PORT -- port where the app is listening
• WEBPACK_DEV_SERVER_PORT -- port for webpack dev server when running in development mode. Default one is 8081, this option might be useful when this port is necessary for some other service.

Example configuration file

NODE_ENV=production
API_BASE=https://recodex.projekty.ms.mff.cuni.cz:4000/v1
PORT=8080