The Studynet API

This is a RESTful API developed for the android mobile application Studynet. The app can be found Here.

Description

This Django Rest Framework backend is developed to process and manage data related to the organization of online university education.

It offers three types of users :

• Teachers
• Students
• Administrators

A permission system ensures that each user has access to endpoints related to their function only.

This project requires the PostgreSQL data base engine, as it uses PostgreSQL specific fields.

Features

• Endpoints protected by a permission system.
• Sending push notifications to the mobile app to keep the users updated on the sessions and homeworks.
• Sending emails to users for password resetting.

Endpoints

The API offers many endpoints to enable the mobile app to read and insert relevant information.

The base link to the API is : https://study-net-api.herokuapp.com/api/ (Site is currently down as Heroku have ceased providing free services.)

An exhaustive list of all available endpoints can be found in an exported postman collection.

Here are a few endpoint examples :

• api/students/

This endpoint allows the creation of a student account, it expects a POST request containing the following information:

{
    "user": {
        "email": "dummyemail@me.com",
        "password": "dummypassword",
        "first_name": "dummyfirst",
        "last_name": "dummylast"
    },
    "registration_number": "123456789",
    "group": 1,
    "section": "ISIL B L3"
}

In case all of the information is correct, the backend will create the student account and return the following result :

{
    "user": {
        "id": 54,
        "email": "dummyemail@me.com",
        "first_name": "dummyfirst",
        "last_name": "dummylast",
        "date_joined": "2021-06-24T22:58:47.245491+01:00"
    },
    "section": {
        "code": "ISIL B L3",
        "number_of_groups": 3,
        "specialty": "ISIL",
        "modules": [
            "COMPIL",
            "GL 3",
            "WEBDEV",
            "ANGLAIS",
            "BDD",
            "SI"
        ]
    },
    "group": 1,
    "registration_number": "123456789",
    "token": "aa376a45172111...dummyToken"
}

The returned information contains details about the assigned section (the code, the modules taught etc...), it also contais a token that uniquely identifies this user.

The token is to be sent with any subsequent request to gain the permissions of the type of the requesting user.

• api/sessions/?section=SECTION_NAME

This endpoint returns information about the sessions concerning sections, it expects a GET request, the request should contain the token in the autorization header.

the url can optionally contain a parameter called section that specifies the code of a section that the sessions should be filtered on, if no section is provided, all existing sessions are returned.

Example result :

[
   {
       "id": 38,
       "teacher_name": "dummyName1",
       "teacher_email": "dummyemail1@me.com",
       "module": "GL 3",
       "module_type": "DIRECTED",
       "section": "ISIL B L3",
       "concerned_groups": [
           1,
           2,
           3
       ],
       "day": 2,
       "start_time": "08:00:00",
       "end_time": "09:30:00",
       "meeting_link": "dummy meeting link 1",
       "meeting_number": "849 325 565",
       "meeting_password": "3FXp8JqMCY3",
       "comment": "",
       "assignment": 52
   },
   {
       "id": 27,
       "teacher_name": "dummyName2",
       "teacher_email": "dummyemail1@me.com",
       "module": "COMPIL 2",
       "module_type": "LECTURE",
       "section": "ACAD A L3",
       "concerned_groups": [
           2
       ],
       "day": 6,
       "start_time": "08:00:00",
       "end_time": "10:00:00",
       "meeting_link": "Dummy meeting link 2",
       "meeting_number": "",
       "meeting_password": "",
       "comment": "DummyComment",
       "assignment": 42
   },
   ...

Each session contains information about its teacher, the concerned section and groups, the schedule and the day (ranging from 1 for saturday to 6 for thursday) and other relevant information specified by the teacher.

Installation process

Installing dependencies

This project depends on packages, the dependencies are specified in the requirements.txt file in the root folder.

To install all dependencies : in the root directory, run :

pip install -r requirements.txt

running migrations

Inside of the Studynet/ folder, you will find a .env example file, it contains an example of the .env file that will contain important environment variables, it needs to be created in that same folder.

Make sure the database credentials are properly configured in the .env file you just created.

To make the migrations :

python manage.py makemigrations

To run the migrations :

python manage.py migrate

Applying Fixtures

The server requires some initial data to be loaded in the database before use.

run :

python manage.py loaddata groups.json

Running the server

The server is now ready to start, simply run :

python manage.py runserver

Congratulations! the server is now up and running.