Sort scoreboard beyond third column, improve CUD validations

[damianhxy]

Summary

Summary generated by Reviewpad on 21 Jun 23 18:44 UTC

This pull request includes changes to several files. The file 'scoreboards.md' has a minor change, sorting all columns in descending order and tie-breaking by submission time. The view file 'app/views/course_user_data/new.html.erb' has several updates, including adding a javascript_include_tag and modifying the onclick function of the submit button. The Scoreboard view has also been updated in the 'scoreboard.rb' file in the 'app/models' directory, including a validation check for the column specification and refactored code to handle all scoreboard columns. Changes have been made to the CourseUserDataController in the Rails application, including modifying error messages and allowing for HTML in the flash[:error] message. The form validation function and nickname validation method have also been updated.

Description

• Refresh scoreboard#show page
• Scoreboard now sorts all columns, not just up to the third column
• Update docs to reflect change
• Fix CUD form validation
• Remove unnecessary error display code: they basically don't work because errors (during create / update) are cleared during redirects, so this PR uses flashes instead. A user would not be able to load the scoreboard if they had errors in their CUD because they would have been redirected to the edit page.

Motivation and Context

Currently, only the first three columns of any scoreboard is sorted (when using a custom column specification). This PR remedies that so all columns are now sorted.

Note: I don't expect this to break any scoreboard code, since scoreboards generally consist of numeric data. Even if they contain string data, to_f casts non-numeric strings to 0.0, which is as good as not sorting.

Closes #970

Furthermore, the custom form validation for the nickname fields is currently broken and does not work. Validation errors are also not shown since a redirect takes place.

This PR fixes the validation code, shows errors in flashes instead, and adds more visual cues (e.g. set maxlength = 32, indicate in help text)

How Has This Been Tested?

Install the following assessment (after unzipping):
randomlab_20230616.tar.zip

Submit any file using three different student accounts. View scoreboard.

Before

Specification: {"scoreboard": [ {"hdr":"Problem 1"}, {"hdr":"Problem 2"}, {"hdr":"Problem 3"}, {"hdr":"Problem 4"}, {"hdr":"Problem 5"}, {"hdr":"Problem 6"} ] }
Observe: PROBLEM 6 (no asc or desc)

Observe: last column not sorted (tiebreak by time)

After (Descending)

Specification: {"scoreboard": [ {"hdr":"Problem 1"}, {"hdr":"Problem 2"}, {"hdr":"Problem 3"}, {"hdr":"Problem 4"}, {"hdr":"Problem 5"}, {"hdr":"Problem 6"} ] }
Observe: PROBLEM 6 [desc]

Observe: last column sorted in descending order

After (Ascending)

Specification: {"scoreboard": [ {"hdr":"Problem 1"}, {"hdr":"Problem 2"}, {"hdr":"Problem 3"}, {"hdr":"Problem 4"}, {"hdr":"Problem 5"}, {"hdr":"Problem 6", "asc": 1} ] }
Observe: PROBLEM 6 [asc]

Observe: last column sorted in ascending order

Others

• Check documentation

Column specification

• Try saving a specification of true -> get error Colspec must be a hash object
• Try saving a specification which is missing quotes around one of the strings -> get error (similar to) Colspec 451: unexpected token at '{hdr:"Problem 6"} ] }'

Form validation

• Test form validation on scoreboard page, edit CUD, new CUD pages: attempt to save nickname with non-ascii characters (e.g. 你好) -> observe alert, and highlighting + focusing of nickname field

• Observe helptext additionally states "(maxlength: 32)"

• You can also disable frontend validation and try saving a nickname of length > 32 and with non-ascii characters (e.g. 12345678123456781234567812345678你好)

Updating via Scoreboard or Edit page

Creation

Types of changes

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

Checklist:

• I have run rubocop for style check. If you haven't, run overcommit --install && overcommit --sign to use pre-commit hook for linting
• My change requires a change to the documentation, which is located at Autolab Docs
• I have updated the documentation accordingly, included in this PR

[najclark]

lgtm, testing behavior looks correct