terms.umn.edu

At The Sound Of The Tone, The Term Will Be…

AKA terms.umn.edu

A web service that tells you what term is active today, or any other day that you might care about.

Terminology

Active: A term that has begun but has not ended.
Latest: The term that began most recently. This term may be over.
Soonest: The active term, or if there is no active term, the next term. Another way of thinking about this is the term that ends the soonest. This term may not have started yet.

If you look for Active terms, you may sometimes get no terms back. If you look for latest or soonest terms, you should always get a term back.

Examples

If today is 2017-08-18 and you check for Undergraduate UMNTC terms

The Active term is Summer, 2017. It began on 2017-05-22 and ends on 2017-08-18, and today’s date falls within that span.
The Latest term is also Summer, 2017. It is the UMNTC Undergraduate term with the most recent start date.
The Soonest term is also Summer, 2017. Summer, 2017 is not complete (so it is the UMNTC Undergraduate term with the soonest end date).

If you check one day later, on 2017-08-19 then you will see:

There is no active term. Summer, 2017 has completed, and the next term has not yet begun.
The Latest term is still Summer, 2017. It is the UMNTC Undergraduate term with the most recent start date.
The Soonest term is Fall, 2017. Summer, 2017 has completed and Fall, 2017 is the next term (so it is the UMNTC Undergraduate term with the soonest end date).

Usage

Get Terms Active for Today:

Get Terms Latest for Today:

Get Terms Soonest for Today:

Get Terms by Date:

The date 2017-09-15 is used for all examples

Get Terms by STRM

STRM 1179 is used on all examples

All terms for STRM 1179
All terms for UMNTC and STRM 1179
The term for UMNTC, career UGRD, and STRM 1179
Data Returned

You will get a collection of term resources back. The data will be like this example:

{
  "id": "6",
  "type": "terms",
  "links": {
    "self": "http://terms.umn.edu/terms/6",
    "prev": "http://terms.umn.edu/terms/5",
    "next": "http://terms.umn.edu/terms/7"
  },
  "attributes": {
  "institution": "UMNCR",
  "strm": "1179",
  "begin-date": "2017-08-22",
  "end-date": "2017-12-14",
  "name": "Fall 2017",
  "career": "UGRD"
  }
}

The prev link will take you to the previous term for the same Institution & Career. The next link will take you to the subsequent term for the same Institution and Career.

Responses for non-existent terms

If you request a collection of terms that contains no terms, such as https://terms.umn.edu/active/1700-01-01, you will get an empty collection back

{
  "data": []
}

If you request a collection of non-existent terms, such as https://terms.umn.edu/0000, you will get an empty collection back

{
  "data": []
}

If you request a single, non-existent term, such as https://terms.umn.edu/terms/0, you will get an error object back

{
  "errors": [
    {
      "title": "Record not found",
      "detail": "The record identified by 0 could not be found.",
      "code": "404",
      "status": "404"
    }
  ]
}

Development

Local development uses the asr_dev_user_<username> space. A connection to the U’s VPN is required to access the development and test databases.

Setup

gem install overcommit
script/setup

Testing

Except for one request spec, these tests are all written as Cucumber feature tests. You can find the scenarios in ./features.

script/test or script/test path/to/test.feature

The single request spec can’t be run individually using script/test. To run it use: bin/rspec spec/request/cors_spec.rb. It will also run on script/test.

To see a test coverage report:

COVERAGE=1 ./script/test
open coverage/index.html to view the report

Deploying

Be sure your Docker containers are running locally by running script/server.

script/deploy [environment]

This will deploy from the master branch and update the terms.umn.edu Jekyll site using the contents of the README.

Note: You must be a member of the umn-terms organization to publish to the Jekyll site. To skip that step run bundle exec cap staging deploy.

URLs

Staging: https://terms-staging.umn.edu/active/today
Production: https://terms.umn.edu/active/today
Documentation site: https://umn-terms.github.io/

Owners

Who is responsible for the web application after initial development?

See this spreadsheet.