ASSIST flowchart

Parses and displays articulation agreements from assist.org as a flowchart of courses students need to take. Node.js, Express.js, React.js.

Features

• Returns list of origin colleges, destination colleges and majors from assist.org as a JSON object.
• Parses articulation agreements as a JSON object, complete with special conditions. For example, courses which must be taken as a series to satisfy a requirement are parsed as a special group.
• Fetches prerequisite courses for certain requirements listed in agreements.
• Resolves college and major codes from assist.org.

Implementation

The following algorithms are implemented in /server/parse-agreement.js.

Algorithm to parse course equivalencies from articulation agreements

1. Articulation agreement text is scraped, trimmed to only the two-column course equivalencies section, and split into lines.
2. Two empty buffers are initialized, one for each column.
3. A line is halved, with each half containing text from each column.
4. The line halves are pushed to their respective buffers.
5. Steps 3 through 4 are repeated until all lines corresponding to a single course equivalency have been pushed to the buffer.
6. Both buffers are flushed and their contained lines are joined to form a description of a course.

Algorithm to represent "one-from-many" and "all-of-above" requirement types

• "One-from-many" requirements are satisfied by taking any course from a list of courses. They are represented by an OR between course equivalencies.
• "All-of-above" requirements are represented by an AND between equivalencies.
• The above requirements can be composed together. For example, the requirement (course_a AND course_b) OR course_c is satisfiable by either taking both course_a as well as course_b or only taking course_c.

1. The course equivalency parsing algorithm above is modified to only flush buffers upon reading all the lines for a single requirement, rather than for a single course equivalency. In other words, when buffers are flushed, they contain "(course_a AND course_b) OR course_c is equivalent to course_d" instead of "course_a is equivalent to course_d"
2. Each requirement is recursively divided into sub-requirements and the relationship between the sub-requirements (OR or AND) is saved.

Installation

With npm installed, run

npm install

Then run

yarn dev

Navigate to

localhost:5000/api?endpoint=

Fetch and parse list of origin colleges by appending

origins

View colleges with agreements with an origin college with the following, with ORIGIN as the origin's path code.

.../api?endpoint=destinations&origin=ORIGIN

View majors with the following. Set DESTINATION as destination's path code and YEAR as academic year (i.e. 16-17).

.../api?endpoint=majors&origin=ORIGIN&destination=DESTINATION&year=YEAR

View the parsed agreement with

.../api?endpoint=agreement&origin=ORIGIN&destination=DESTINATION&year=YEAR&major=MAJOR

For example, the following returns the agreement from Allan Hancock College to California Polytechnic University, Pomona in the academic year 15-16 for Architecture B. Arch.

localhost:5000/api?endpoint=agreement&origin=AHC&destination=CPP&year=15-16&major=ARCH