Assignment FAQ & Corrections

 Corrections

A couple of things pointed out by students on the assignment spec:

1. Part C) on book suggestions is missing a closing </books> tag in the example data
2. Part D) on borrowing data asks for the course id as a post parameter. This is not actually needed so can be omitted. (That said, if we wanted to track which students from which courses were using the books, it might be useful in some scenarios).

FAQ

1. what is the total percent (approximate) set aside for the optional sections of the assignment?
   It is difficult to give an exact answer on this, as marks will depend to some extent on the quality of the main components. That said, assignments implementing only the main components are unlikely to score 70% or above. So - very approximately, each optional section is worth up to 7.5%.
2. What is the .htaccess file for?
   This file can contain Apache web server mod_rewrite directives to allow you to create clean (RESTful) URLs for your web service. For example if a user enters a URL like www.pets.com/cat/50 this can be converted to www.pets.com/index.php?type=cat&id=50. Frameworks such as Codeigniter will tend to have a preconfigured .htaccess file which may well do what you need already, though it's worth having a look at it to see what it is doing. Also see this post for a way to handle it with PHP
   
3.   What is the physical submission for this assignment? 23rd Feb Correction: You will be required to hand in a single page sheet at the coursework hub, containing a link to your documentation file. Please see Blackboard Announcements for further details.
4. Is there any reason why all of the book titles have a forward slash at the end of them? Should they be retained or can I get rid of them? These are not needed and are probably an artifact from the way the data was exported originally - you can get rid of them
5. Are there any 'set' links we have to use for the client side, or do they just need to be entered into the report. No set links for the client page, but please make sure we have the link to your client URL in the documentation you provide at:

   ../atwd/books/doc/index.html

6.  Does the client side need to have a XML and JSON version or just one?  You only need to use one of the data formats from your service on the client side - the choice is up to you.
7. There are other courses in the books data apart from the "CC" ones. This is because the courses list only contains computing-related courses, but some books are common to other departments. Don't worry as we will test using only the course codes in the courses.xml
8. What do we mean by " allows full browsing of the dataset "? By this we mean that you can view all the courses, then drill in to see all the books for that course, with the books list linked to a book detail page that also show the recommendations. You don't need a single page that shows all the books in one view.

Any other queries? Let us know via the comments.