VISLOG (Catalog Visualization)

Vislog is a project to visualize the Union University Catalog

Go to installation instructions.

Architecture

Backend

JSON Processing

• Manual trigger / API endpoint
• Gets triggered annually
• Manual trigger / timer

Static Asset Server

• Home page
• Program graphs and course relationships

Static Asset Storage

• Parsed schema
• Generated program visualizations

Interactive Server

• Maintain web socket connections between sessions
• Reads program information from the static asset server
• Authentication with Union's SSO / Azure Active Directory

User Data Storage

• User data
• Student id for identification
• Could be blob storage storing user data as files
• JSON or binary files

Frontend

Static Site

• Display home page
• Display generated program visualizations
• Combine with interactive client?
  • Can reduce system complexity
  • Combines static server with interactive server (Seperation of concerns?)

Interactive Clients

• Interactive planning for program progression
• Planning by semesters
• Real time collaboration between student and advisor
• Show sessions of courses available? (Depending on the data provided by IT)
• Search bar for allowing to arbitrarily select courses not already selected in program map to compensate for the parts of the catalog that cannot be parsed

Installation

Ensure that you have the latest version of npm and the rust toolchain installed (instructions vary based on your OS)

Clone the main branch of the following git repositories:

• Frontend: https://github.com/sunkit02/vislog-front-ts
• Backend: https://github.com/UUCompSci/vislog

Build Steps

Run the following commands in the project root of the respective repos.

Frontend

Install all packages needed for the frontend.

npm install

Install all packages needed for the frontend.

npm run build

Keep note of the {project-root}/dist directory that contains the output of the build

Backend

Enter the directory of the vislog-server subcrate (we are building the server)

cd vislog-server

Compile the server (build in release mode with optimizations)

cargo build -r

Keep note of the executable located at {project-root}/target/release called vislog-server(.exe) (You may or may not have the .exe extension based on your OS)

Installation Steps

1. Find a directory where you want to install the server to. We’ll call it target-dir from now on
2. Copy the vislog-server(.exe) executable to target-dir
3. Copy the entire dist directory from the frontend build to target-dir
4. Copy the {vislog-repo-root-dir}/vislog-server/default-configs.toml to target-dir and rename it to vislog-configs.toml
5. Run the vislog-server(.exe) executable
6. Open your browser of choice (preferably Chromium based) and go to the following URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080