fachschaft07 / guide7

App providing comfortable access to student services of the computer science department (07) of the Munich University of Applied Sciences.

Looking for some screenshots? Take a look in our GitHub pages!

Guide7

App for comfortable access of the student services for department 07 (computer science) at the Munich University for Applied Sciences.

App has been reworked using Flutter. The old android app can be found under the java-app folder.

For information about the app and its architecture take a look in the projects wiki!

Getting Started

Since this is a flutter app, the basics are described here. Just follow the provided steps - including installation - to get you started!

guide7's Issues

Privacy policy statement

I already added a view in the navigation view of the app for the privacy policy statement which we'll definitely need.

@LokiNightray @thomai You mentioned that the university has a pattern which we must use (in case the app is distributed by us and not over me), Can we get that?

Professor Browser

It is quiet common for students to search for a professor to write them an e-mail or seek more information about them (website, etc.). Normally you would end up here.

To make it more comfortable for students to find them and write them e-mails, it would be nice if there were a browser view within the app where you can easily search for profs.

I18n - Internationalization

It would be good to provide english and german translations for the app.

Lost and Found

I remember that the old app had something like "Lost and found" where people could look if something they lost has been found.

Mealplan (Speiseplan)

Implement the mealplan. (See the old implementation in the java android Guide7 version).

Contributing Guidelines, Issue/PR templates

Please add contributing guidelines, issue templates and pull request templates as mentioned here https://github.com/Fachschaft07/Guide7/community in the list.

That'd favor further collaboration, especially by other students.

On-the-fly translations for non-locale content

Once #24 is done there will be german and english available as languages. Nevertheless all the applications content like notice board entries, weekplan entries are written in german.

Google provides the Google Translator API which can even translate HTML (for the notice board entry content which is HTML (at least in case of the HTML crawler provider)).
The idea is to provide on-the-fly translations in the correct locale once the locale differs from the original content (german).

List of required APIs to ZPA and other remote services

Create a list of needed APIs to the ZPA!

Feature request: Schedule widget

Develop a Widget for the schedule view.

Services visible when logged out

Some services (public notice board, appointments, etc.) can be easily be made visible for non-logged-in users. People without ZPA login might want to use the public app services as well.

Tasks to do for completion:

• Make login skippable (Smaller non-raised button below the login button)
  • Implement static method isLoggedIn() in another utility class ZPA which is checking the CredentialStorage for stored credentials. We can then call ZPA.isLoggedIn() from anywhere in the app.
• Hide non-viewable items in the navigation(s) when not logged in
• Implement public notice board for non-logged in users

Periodic background tasks | Refreshing notice board entries and notifications

In the old app we had a periodic pull for notice board entries and other resource data in order to check whether it changed.

People like me do not want to check the app and manually refresh the notice board everyday but rather be notified by the app about new notice board entries.

We will need a general way to support periodic background tasks. I did some research:
Currently Flutter does not directly support periodic background tasks but there are already plans to implement it in the future (See here). There is a plugin available which will do the job for android and iOS just fine: https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/background_fetch

The job is to create an abstraction around the used background_fetch plugin in order to replace it with the official Flutter implementation once it is ready. Create an example for fetching notice board entries every half an hour. Document the usage in the Wiki for developers to use it with ease.

Summing up:

• Implement background_fetch in an own periodic background task abstraction
• Create notice board entry refresh every 30 minutes
• Document usage in the Wiki
• Notification in case the notice board received new entries

Cannot start app without internet connection

Should be able to access the app without internet connection. Just skip the splash screen check if logged in or not if there is not connectivity.

Appointment end date is always equal to the appointment start date

When you look into the appointments you'll notice that the appointment start date is always the appointment end date, thus there is only shown one date.

Navigation view

Currently we only have the navigation bar and the floating action button for navigation. We will need the floating action button for example for creating custom events in the weekview. Thus we need another way to navigate. Create an additional view and navigation item in the bottom navigation bar ("More...") which will contain additional menu items.

Personal Schedule

Every once in a while I'd like to look at how my schedule actually is looking like, just like I can when using the ZPA. The week plan is good but does not give a good overview over your schedule.

It should be an actual schedule where you can overlook the whole week just like in ZPA.

Weekplan

Implement the ZPA weekplan. We will first need a widget to display the events. Maybe write an own one.

Scroll to current day

When using the week plan it automatically scrolls to the monday of the current week. It would be better if we could scroll to the current day of the current week and show the next week on, e.g. Sunday or Saturday

Add own entries to schedule

As a user I want to add my own entries to the schedule, as the ZPA does not always have all my subjects listed.

Login

We need a dialog to login into the ZPA to access student services.

• Should show when opening the app for the first time
• Should show when logged out
• Should save credentials securely so that users will not need to enter credentials repeatedly on each app start

Not able to refresh notice board (personal and public).

Might be a problem within the parser.

Custom schedule entries individually removable.

One might want to individually remove schedule entries rather than go to settings and delete all.

Roomsearch

Implement the ZPA roomsearch.

Nine Integration for the Weekplan

Integrate Nine events to the weekplan.

FAQ / "Ersti Guide" - Guide for new students

It would be cool to get the Ersti Guide into the app.

Build for Android and iOS on Travis

Write "Getting Started" for developers.

Team members mentioned that it was quiet complicated for them to get started developing.

Write a Getting Started document to ease that.

Screenshot for personal schedule (ZPA)

Add Android widget to store a screenshot of the personal schedule to the device.

Appointments

Show appointments from here in a list. Use the iCalendar feed to get the data.

Add an additional background task to check whether an appointment is near (next day) and fire a notification if there is one.

Cannot open links when tapping on link in the notice board

We use the flutter_markdown package to display the notice board entries.
As you can see here there is already a onTapLink callback in the markdown widget that we can use.

It should open the systems default browser when tapping on a link.

Static Notification "Next lecture"

A static notification that shows the next lecture coming up would be helpful (optionally hide the notification until the next day, if the last lecture has passed etc.)

Weekplan Android Widget

The old app had an android widget which displayed the week plan events for the current day. To ensure that people won't miss it after the release we should provide it.

Continuous delivery to play store

It would be cool to provide continuous delivery to the play store via Travis builds.
This means that releases will automatically be delivered via the Google Play Store API to the Google Play Store on push to a specific branch (like alpha for alpha releases, beta for beta releases and master for production releases).

Replace validity range icon (notice board entry) with pie diagram

Currently we only have an icon "timelapse" from material icons in front of each notice board entries validity range.
It would be cool to replace it with a dynamic pie diagram showing the range.

Push Notifications (with Firebase?) for news/events/...

It would be good if we could send push notifications to all devices about events and news.

Add a setting to toggle notifications

Unit testing

Goal of this task is to fire up unit testing capabilities within the apps processes.

• Check unit tests continuously on Travis
• Document in the GitHub wiki how the unit tests work and what parts of the app must be unit tested and what parts are optionally unit tested
• Add unit tests for important parts of the app (Parsers, storages, database, etc.)
• (OPTIONALLY) Try to unit test widgets

@hmkrivoj I'll assign this one to you if that is ok. Comment if you have something to add/change.

Notice Board

Show the personal notice board from the ZPA.

Background Fetch for iOS

See #34

For iOS we need to provide the setup for the background_fetch plugin once we have testing devices and a Mac!

The setup guide can be found in the plugin description here.

Integrate Nine room search

Integrate the nine room search.
See #29 for additional info.

Adding dialog after login that app is preparing first start

The first retrieval of notice board entries after lookup will take a while because lecturer images are loaded from hm.edu and thus it takes about 5 - 10 seconds.

Don't do that in the notice board view but rather show a dialog or separate screen preparing the first app start and loading lecturer images. Otherwise the user will think the notice board entry lookup is slow, which we dont want since the app should make a fast impression.

Setup App Server with REST API + Database Server + Continuous deployment via branch

BLOCKED: Need to wait for server (VM)

We need a REST API in order to use firebase cloud notifications and target specific user groups.
Thus setup the server (VM) with a Java application server + database server.
Develop application which realizes the REST API.
Lastly setup continuous deployment of the REST API application to the application server via a GitHub branch which builds the application on Travis and deploys it to the application server.

(Optionally) Use Let's Encrypt to encrypt http connection of the server to the app.

Add news/events and display them in the same view as the notice board (Schwarzes Brett) entries.

The notice board (Schwarzes Brett) has already been implemented and gets the data from the ZPA. If we want to provide news/events other than these mentioned in the notice board we would need another view.

Maybe use the same view as the notice board and just mark them in a different way (color the title, add a badge in different color, etc.)

Navigation and Routing

Provide a basic implementation of a navigation with routing to and from the individual navigation routes (views).

Develop central Repository (Where the data comes from)

Develop a Repository class (Singleton) which will act as the point to get all data the app is using from.

All API calls, Calls to local storage, etc. have to be done over a own repository implementation.

Rework schedule entry view.

Because it looks bad.

Add Unit tests to achieve good code coverage

GitHub pages to show off the project

Create GitHub pages to show off the current project state with screenshots of the app and describing the functionality.

Cannot delete custom week plan events

You can create, edit but not remove custom events from the week plan.

Add delete button to the detail view.

App Logo/Icon, Play Store Banner, and other images

We will need a nice App Logo/Icon, as well as a banner for the play store, screen shots (not that important yet), etc.

This task is about designing one.

Script collection