Worksheet editor: "include" badly named

[William Grant]

Exercise include code no longer works. This is used a lot.

To reproduce, create an exercise with at least one test case, set include code to "a = 'blah'", and submit "print a" as a solution.

[Matt Giuca (mgiuca)]

That's odd, because I just used it to write the Hello world exercise in sample data.

Though I imported "re" to use with the test suite. Do you think the "include code" works correctly on the test suite, but isn't available for the user? Perhaps that was by design.

[David Coles (dcoles)]

I think what you'd want to do is include a Varable in the suite rather than in the include code. I think include code is functions for the exercise writer to use for checking (normalization/test functions) rather than being part of the exercise.

[Matt Giuca (mgiuca)]

That is what I suspected this morning. In this case, we've all been tricked by the UI into thinking that the "include code" is for the user, when in fact it's for supporting the unit tests (and I believe it was designed this way all along).

That means that to fix this bug, we just need to change the UI to very clearly mark that this code is for use in the testing, not by the user.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

But production exercises are actually broken now. I cannot see them to find out why -- it's possible that there is another issue. Regardless, we should document thoroughly in the UI what the purpose of this field is, since nobody seems to know for sure.

See http://ivle.informatics.unimelb.edu.au/subjects/langcomp/2009/2/+worksheets/8002041 for some brokenness -- basic_concordance.xml is an example exercise.

[Matt Giuca (mgiuca)]

OK so the resolution for this bug is simply to fix the UI. Don't mess around with the inner workings of the tutorial system. Then file this as closed.

However, note a new bug #525609 is related and ongoing ("Only 'ignore' defaults are supported at this time").

[Matt Giuca (mgiuca)]

Fixed in trunk r1704.