University Teaching Management System (UTMS)

Advanced Programming (AP) – University of Tehran – Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering**

Overview

This repository contains the source code for UTMS, a university teaching management and social-media platform implemented in C++20. It was developed as the Sixth Computer Assignment for the Advanced Programming course at the University of Tehran.

The system combines a simplified educational management service with a social network. Students, professors, and the default university account can authenticate, publish posts, connect with each other, receive notifications, manage course offerings, enroll in courses, use teaching-assistant workflows, and interact with course announcement channels.

The project includes both the original command-line interface required by the assignment and a full graphical web interface powered by a lightweight APHTTP-style server.

Project Objectives

• ✅ University course management: Create course offerings, enforce prerequisites, verify major eligibility, prevent schedule/exam conflicts, and manage student enrollment.
• ✅ Social-media layer: Publish personal posts, connect users bidirectionally, browse personal pages, and receive chronological notifications.
• ✅ Teaching-assistant workflow: Professors can publish TA forms, students can submit requests, and professors can accept or reject applicants.
• ✅ Course announcement channels: Each course offering has a dedicated channel where professors and accepted TAs can post announcements.
• ✅ Complete web interface: Browser-accessible pages provide graphical forms for the normal workflows, so regular usage no longer requires the CLI.
• ✅ Stable backend: The web server includes request/response logging, socket timeouts, safer request parsing, upload validation, and RAII-managed request handling.
• ✅ Showcase features: Optional state persistence, JSON API routes, screenshots, documentation pages, and demo assets are included for a stronger GitHub presentation.

System Architecture & Phases

The project follows the three phases of the original assignment series.

1️⃣ Phase 1: Core UTMS Engine

• Load students, professors, majors, and courses from CSV datasets.
• Let the system manager create course offerings.
• Let students enroll in and drop course offerings after all eligibility checks.
• Let users publish posts, connect to each other, browse pages, and receive notifications.

2️⃣ Phase 2: Extended Academic Features

• Course announcement channels for every offering.
• Profile photos and post images.
• TA forms created by professors.
• TA requests submitted by students.
• Accept/reject workflow for applicants.
• Accepted TAs gain course-channel access.

3️⃣ Phase 3: Web Interface

• / provides the UTMS login page.
• /home shows a role-aware dashboard.
• Students can enroll, drop, view registered courses, browse channels, and request TA positions.
• Professors can publish channel posts, create TA forms, review applicants, and close TA forms.
• The system manager can create new course offerings from a graphical form.
• Ordinary users can publish posts with PNG images, manage profile photos, browse personal pages, connect to users, and read notifications.

The web interface delegates to the same Instruction_Handler business rules used by the CLI, keeping behavior consistent across interfaces.

Screenshots

Project Structure

The project is organized as follows:

UTMS/
├── data/                                 # Default CSV datasets used by demo/test commands
│   ├── data_courses.csv                  # Sample course dataset
│   ├── data_majors.csv                   # Sample major dataset
│   ├── data_professors.csv               # Sample professor dataset
│   └── data_students.csv                 # Sample student dataset
├── docs/                                 # Project documentation
│   ├── assignments/                      # Original AP assignment PDFs
│   │   ├── APS03-A6.1-Description.pdf    # Phase 1 assignment description
│   │   ├── APS03-A6.2-Description.pdf    # Phase 2 assignment description
│   │   └── APS03-A6.3-Description.pdf    # Phase 3 assignment description
│   ├── api-routes.md
│   ├── architecture.md
│   ├── cli-commands.md
│   ├── screenshots.md
│   ├── state-persistence.md
│   └── testing.md
├── includes/                             # Header files
├── includes/                             # Header files
│   ├── app_controller.hpp                # Application-level wrapper
│   ├── class_*.hpp                       # Domain models
│   ├── handler_instruction.hpp           # Business-rule dispatcher
│   ├── io_*.hpp                          # CSV and terminal I/O
│   ├── server.hpp                        # APHTTP-style server interface
│   ├── web_handlers.hpp                  # HTML and JSON API handlers
│   └── ...
├── sources/                              # C++20 implementation files
│   ├── main.cpp                          # CLI/Web startup mode selection
│   ├── handler_instruction.cpp           # UTMS command execution
│   ├── io_terminal.cpp                   # Terminal command parser
│   ├── io_csv.cpp                        # Dataset reader
│   └── ...
├── utils/                                # Original APHTTP utility mirror
├── web/                                  # Static assets, favicon, and runtime uploads
│   ├── UTMS.png                          # Transparent UTMS logo asset
│   ├── login.html                        # Login page style reference
│   └── uploads/                          # Runtime PNG uploads
├── screenshots/                          # README preview screenshots
│   ├── login-dark.png
│   ├── login-light.png
│   ├── dashboard-dark.png
│   ├── dashboard-light.png
│   ├── post-details-dark.png
│   └── post-details-light.png
├── scripts/                              # Automated smoke/regression tests
├── tests/                                # CLI smoke input/expected output
├── Makefile                              # Build, test, format, lint, sanitizer targets
├── LICENSE                               # MIT License
└── README.md                             # Project documentation

Architecture Diagram

flowchart TD
    CSV[CSV datasets] --> App[UTMSApplication]
    State[Optional state file] --> App
    App --> Core[Instruction_Handler]
    Core --> Domain[Domain Models]
    CLI[CLI Adapter] --> App
    Browser[Browser] --> Server[APHTTP-style Server]
    Server --> Web[HTML Web Handlers]
    Server --> API[JSON API Handlers]
    Web --> Core
    API --> Core
    Core --> State

Loading

More details are available in docs/architecture.md.

Setup & Verification

Built with C++20 for Linux environments.

1. Install dependencies

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential make curl

Optional development tools:

sudo apt-get install clang-format clang-tidy

2. Build

make clean && make

The phase-three executable is generated as:

./out.utms

A compatibility symlink named utms.out is also created.

3. Run in terminal mode

./out.utms data/data_majors.csv data/data_students.csv data/data_courses.csv data/data_professors.csv --cli

4. Run in web mode

./out.utms data/data_majors.csv data/data_students.csv data/data_courses.csv data/data_professors.csv --web

Then open:

http://localhost:5000

A custom port can be selected with:

./out.utms data/data_majors.csv data/data_students.csv data/data_courses.csv data/data_professors.csv --web --port 8080

5. Optional state persistence

./out.utms data/data_majors.csv data/data_students.csv data/data_courses.csv data/data_professors.csv --web --state state/local.utms-state

or:

UTMS_STATE_FILE=state/local.utms-state ./out.utms data/data_majors.csv data/data_students.csv data/data_courses.csv data/data_professors.csv --web

See docs/state-persistence.md.

Testing and Quality

Run the full test suite:

make test

Individual scripts:

./scripts/run_smoke_tests.sh
./scripts/run_cli_regression_tests.sh
./scripts/run_web_smoke_tests.sh

The web regression test covers login, authorization, API routes, PNG upload, enrollment, request/response logging, and optional state persistence.

Additional development targets:

make sanitize   # AddressSanitizer + UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer build
make format     # clang-format, if installed
make lint       # clang-tidy, if installed

JSON API Preview

The web server also exposes a small REST-like JSON API:

POST /api/login
POST /api/logout
GET  /api/me
GET  /api/users
GET  /api/user?id=<user_id>
GET  /api/courses
GET  /api/notifications

See docs/api-routes.md and demo/api-demo.sh.

Web Workflow Coverage

The web UI contains dedicated pages for the operations required in phase three:

• Login/logout and role-aware dashboard
• Create social posts with optional PNG images
• Save/delete profile photos
• View course offerings with table filtering
• Search and display personal pages
• Enroll/drop/view courses as a student
• Create course offerings as the system manager
• Browse course channels and read channel posts
• Publish course-channel posts as a professor or accepted TA
• Create, request, review, and close TA forms
• Connect to users and read notifications

Implementation Notes

• Command arguments are order-independent after ?, as required by the assignment.
• Personal posts and course posts are displayed newest-first where the specification requires timeline ordering.
• Course offerings are stored in a deque so object addresses remain stable when new offerings are added.
• The login page intentionally does not expose privileged manager credentials.
• Web requests are checked against the active session cookie before serving dashboard/action pages.
• Session cookies use HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, and Path=/.
• Uploaded PNG files are validated by signature and stored under web/uploads/.
• User-generated content is HTML-escaped in pages and JSON-escaped in API output.
• The HTTP server logs requests/responses by default and redacts password/cookie fields.
• Socket I/O timeouts and SIGPIPE handling reduce the chance of idle browser connections blocking or crashing the server.

HTTP logging can be disabled for a quieter run:

UTMS_HTTP_LOG=0 ./out.utms data/data_majors.csv data/data_students.csv data/data_courses.csv data/data_professors.csv --web

Documentation

• docs/architecture.md
• docs/api-routes.md
• docs/cli-commands.md
• docs/testing.md
• docs/state-persistence.md
• docs/screenshots.md

Author

Developed as a University of Tehran Advanced Programming course project by:

• Meraj Rastegar

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.