Introduction
The directory structure may at first seem a bit complicated, and maybe it is. However we believed it important to clearly separate the different files used. In addition one also have to deal with the inherited separation of a Web directory and a CGI directory. Further there was a need for a separation between the Courses/Subjects, to facilitate creation and deletion of individual Courses/Subjects. This rest of this chapter will explain the directories and the files with in them.
The CGI (Common Gateway Interface) directory contains all the perl script. The scripts are called from the question pages and from the applets. The directory must therefore be public. This directory may have different names on different servers, most common is cgi or cgi-bin. The name of the CGI directory must be added as a parameter value in the HTML pages containing the applets.
The CGI directory must also contain a file named "fileroot". This file should contain the path to the whole structure in fig. 1. For example if Directory Structure above is located under C:\ on the hard disk, the first line of the file "fileroot" should be: "C:\Directory Structure".
The Courses Directory
This directory contains sub directories for the individual courses/subjects. In fig. 1, SubjectI and SubjectII are names of courses. These names are assigned by the teacher when he/she creates a new course using the CreateCourseApplet. For the CGI scripts to work properly it is important that the directory name is Courses and that it is located as shown in fig. 1.
Courses and its subdirectory Courses/Users ate the only directories needed to be created on the server when installing the system. It is sufficient to have the rights set for the web server as it is the only user to access the files in the Courses directory and its subdirectories directly. And the web is also what is actually set to be the "owner" of the files/directories created through a browser/script (on the server ceibo, but not on for example elmer).
This directory contains a password file and files describing the access
that each teacher have to the subject. The password file is named "password"
and have a syntax looking like this:
The other type of files in the directory Courses/Users/ are files with
extension ".acc". These files contains information about which courses
belongs to which teacher. There is one ".acc" file for each teacher
and the name of the file follow this syntax: "UserName.acc". An
empty access file must be created by the administrator when he gives a
teacher his/her password. They are then extended by the CreateCourseApplet
when the teachers creates new courses or when other teachers grants them
access to their courses.
The PageData directory contains files describing their corresponding
QuestionPages. These files all have the extension ".data". The .data
files describes the QuestionPages using the following syntax:
QuestionPage type specific file syntax
cross
Q = a string with the question text.
A1- A5 = strings with the different alternatives, one to five alternatives
are allowed.
C = an integer telling which alternative is the right one.
As the answer should be written by the student for written questions the answer argument is blank. Note that all "\n" characters in the Question Text for pages of type written are replaced by "<BR>".
The students answers are saved in the Courses/"SubjectName"/StudentAnswer/ directory. Each question page has a file containing the answers of all the students who have answered the page. The file has the same name as the QuestionPage but with the extension ".answer".
The syntax of the file is as follows:
The "#@[" delimiter separates the answers given to subquestion I, subquestion II, etc. The choice of the somewhat awkward delimiter is due to the fact that the delimiter isn't allowed to be in student answers for question pages of type written. "#@[" is if not impossible at least highly unlikely to exist in a student answer. This is of course not the right way to deal with the delimiter problem but it was easy to implement.
The WWW Directory:
The WWW directory is the directory responsible for holding the HTML pages and applets used by the students and the teachers. Even though the html pages containing the applets e.g. MakePage.html resides directly under the directory WWW, the .jar files containing the Java code are located in the subdirectory called distans (WWW/distans/). Online user manuals are found in a subdirectory named Docs (WWW/Docs/).
The other directory is described below. One should note that the QuestionPages are put in a separate directory to allow the teachers to create directories for the actual learning material. A directory named for example LearningPages could be located directly under "SubjectName" making the path to the page look like this WWW/"SubjectName"/LearningPage.
The WWW/"SubjectName"/QuestionPages directory:
This directory contains the QuestionPages created by the teacher. The teacher should make links to these pages for the students to be able to find them.
The JS Directory:
The JS directory contains static files used by the makeCross.perl, makeAlt.perl and makeWritten.perl to create the QuestionPages. The contents in the three files cross.js, alt.js and written.js is the HTML/JavaScript code that is common for all QuestionPages of the corresponding type. The reason that separate files are used (and that not everything is put in the makeX.perl) is that it is easier to modify the .js files than the scripts and that it is quite a job letting scripts generate HTML/JavaScript code (so the more static code that can be used, the better).