TAHub Contacts User Guide

Introduction

Hi there! 👋

If you are a busy Computer Science student juggling Teaching Assistant roles and struggling to keep track of your many students, TAHub Contacts is a desktop application for you to easily manage your student contact details!

Think about TAHub Contacts as a little helper, residing on your computer, made just for you, the Computing TA.

Overview

TAHub Contacts allows you to easily:

• Manage your students
• Organise them by course and tutorial group
• Mark attendance

Interested? Head down to quick start to get started!

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Table of Contents

• Quick Start 🚀
  • Example TA Workflow
• Features 💻
  • Data Formats
  • MAIN Commands
    • Viewing help : help
    • Listing all students : list
    • Clearing all entries : clear
    • Exiting the program : exit
  • STUDENT
    • Adding a student : person-add
    • Editing a student : person-edit
    • Finding a student: person-find
    • Deleting a student : person-delete
  • COURSE
    • Adding a course: course-add
    • Editing a course: course-edit
    • Deleting a course : course-delete
  • ENROLLMENT
    • Enrolling a student : enroll
    • Unenrolling a student : unenroll
  • ATTENDANCE
    • Marking presence : attend-present
    • Marking absence : attend-absent
    • Removing last attendance : attend-remove
    • Clearing attendance : attend-clear
  • DATA
    • Saving the data
    • Editing data file
• FAQ ❔
• Known Issues 🐛
• Command Summary 📒

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Quick start 🚀

1. Ensure you have Java 17 or above installed in your Computer.

   • How to check your Java version? Run java -version in your terminal.
   • Don't have Java 17 or above, download here.

2. Download the latest .jar file from here.

3. Copy the file to the folder you want to use as the home folder for the program.

   • Make sure that this folder is empty. (Program files will be saved in it!)

4. Open a command terminal (Windows | MacOS | Linux), cd into the folder you put the jar file in, and run java -jar tahub-contacts.jar to run the application.
   A GUI similar to the below should appear in a few seconds. Note how the app contains some sample data.
   

5. Type the command in the command box and press Enter to execute it. e.g. typing help and pressing Enter will open the help window, which links you back to this page.
   Some example commands you can try:

   • list : Lists all students.
   • person-add m/A0296210X n/John Tan p/98765432 e/johnt@email.com a/John street, block 123, #01-01 : Adds a contact named John Tan to TAHub Contacts.
   • person-delete m/A0296210X : Deletes the student with the matriculation number A0296210X. In this case, the John Tan that we just added.
   • clear : Deletes all contacts.
   • exit : Exits the app.

6. Refer to the Features below for the juicy details of each command. Alternatively check the Command Summary for a quick list of the available commands. Have fun!

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Example TA Workflow

1. Make sure you're starting from an empty student list. Use the command clear if it isn't.
2. Let's say you have two students from your T05 class for the course CS2005, Computer Examples, Jane, and John.
3. Add the two students into TAHub Contacts using person-add :
   • person-add m/A1234567Q n/Jane p/99871234 e/jahn@email.com a/12 AMK Ave
   • person-add m/A2233445X n/John p/88112233 e/john@email.com a/200 Bedok Road
4. Now add the course CS2005 using course-add
   • course-add c/CS2005 n/Computer Examples
5. Then, add your students to their class using enroll .
   • Jane: enroll m/A1234567Q c/CS2005 tut/T05
   • John: enroll m/A2233445X c/CS2005 tut/T05
6. You should now see the following in TAHub Contacts.

7. Fast forward a bit, you just had your first tutorial session with this class. Jane showed up, but John didn't. So it's time to mark attendance!

8. Use the attend-present and attend-absent commands:

   • Jane: attend-present m/A1234567Q c/CS2005 tut/T05
   • John: attend-absent m/A2233445X c/CS2005 tut/T05

9. You just recorded their attendance! Click on the Attendance button to see their attendance. For instance, here's Jane's:

   

This is just a simple example. For more details, check the Features section below.

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Features 💻

Data Formats

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Main Commands

The main basic commands for TAHub Contacts.

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Student Commands

This is for managing your individual students, modifying their attributes and information.

See Course Commands or Enrollment Commands regarding your students' courses and tutorial groups.

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Course Commands

This is for managing the courses you are (or previously were, cuz why not) teaching.

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Enrollment Commands

This is for you to attach (enroll) and unattach (unenroll) students from specific courses and tutorials for better management.

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Attendance Commands

This is for you to conveniently keep track of each one of your students' attendance records.

Each of your students will have an attendance record associated with each unique course and tutorial group. This record is to be edited over the duration of a semester (or longer), where you can mark (present 😃 or absent 😦) and unmark attendance for for each consecutive session.

To view the attendance record of a student,

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Data

Saving the data

Ever experience the stomach-churning sinking feeling of being petrified when you forgot to Ctrl/Cmd-S something important?

Don't worry!

TAHub data is saved in your drive automatically after any command that changes the data. You don’t need to save manually!

Editing the data file

Data is saved automatically in the JSON files [JAR file location]/data/addressbook.json, storing the list of your students and [JAR file location]/data/courselist.json, storing the list of courses.

Advanced users are welcome to update data directly by editing that data file. The file structure should be decently self-explanatory.

Coming Soon

Added Support for more Tutorial IDs

• Currently, we only support tutorial IDs of a specific format, as mentioned here. However, we are aware that there are valid but rarer tutorial IDs with an additional character at the back like T01A. Due to time limitations, we are not able to support all potential tutorial IDs and this could be fixed in a future iteration.
  

Quick Refresh of Edited Course Name

• Currently, on editing the name of a particular course using the course-edit command, the user(TA) will have to wait for sometime before it is visible in the UI or will have to reopen the Attendance Window to refresh the screen to view the new Course Name. However, we are aware that this will hinder the efficiency of a fast working TA and so this will be fixed in a future iteration.
  

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FAQ ❔

Q: How do I transfer my data to another Computer?
A: Install the app in the other computer and overwrite the empty data file it creates with the file that contains the data of your previous TAHub Contacts home folder.

Q: I accidentally performed the wrong command. Is there a way for me to... revert the change?
A: Unfortunately, we have not implemented an undo command for TAHub contacts. 😔
So be careful especially when you're using destructive (deletion) commands!

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Known issues 🐛

1. When using multiple screens, if you move the application to a secondary screen, and later switch to using only the primary screen, the GUI will open off-screen. The remedy is to delete the preferences.json file created by the application before running the application again.
2. If you minimize the Help Window and then run the help command (or use the Help menu, or the keyboard shortcut F1) again, the original Help Window will remain minimized, and no new Help Window will appear. The remedy is to manually restore the minimized Help Window.

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Command summary 📒

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