Hello everyone,
I apologise in advance if this question is unnecessary. I have been searching for some time but could not find an answer. As part of my bachelor thesis I am integrating our existing github classroom questions and tests into Coderunner. Things start to pile up. My template is getting longer and I am ending up with more and more support files. So I was wondering since for example dependencies and template logic for junit and checkstyle testing is generally used by all questions why not put some stuff on the jobe server itself. This would have some advantages like modularisation. Might there also be performance benefits? With modern internet connections, sending this kind of data is not a problem. But maybe decoding and encoding puts more load on the server?
At the end of the day I am not sure as I am not that experienced. I am probably missing some important security issues here.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advanced.
There are three places you can store support files:
- In individual questions.
- In question prototypes.
- On the Jobe server.
Method (1) is OK for one-off use of a file, e.g. the data file for a particular file-reading question. You shouldn't use it for files that are needed by multiple questions however as it's then very difficult to maintain your question bank when you want to update the support files. You should instead define a new question type containing the common files.
Method (2) is the usual method to use in the situation you describe. All the support files from the prototype are loaded into the question workspace when the run begins. Our in-house python3_scratchpad question type has 10 support files with over 2000 lines of code. This is an efficient method because support files are cached on the Jobe server so are only ever uploaded once. The support files can be updated by the question author without requiring access to the Jobe server. Updates to the Jobe server don't require that you re-install all your support files.
Method (3) can be used if you have a very large number of support files and/or very large files and/or files that need special access rights. For example, if you have a question type for a new language you would nearly always install that on the jobe server rather than trying to include the entire language in question prototype support files. We do use this method occasionally but prefer to use (2) whenever possible.
Hope that helps.