This gem was last updated on the 20.03.2024 (dd.mm.yyyy notation), at 01:58:07 o'clock.

Introduction to the studium-gem

Welcome to the legendary Studium project! This project makes our brains go epic-mode (via oldschool training, though).

This is the documentation that refers to the 0.12.x release series. This release series was started in July 2022 and obsoleted the older 0.11.x release series that was started in May 2022.

The primary focus of the 0.11.x series was a clean-up - old code that was no longer in use was removed. The primary focus of the 0.12.x series, though, is to extend the project while doing clean-up work. For instance, the java-bindings were started, and the ruby-libui bindings were improved on windows in particular. In fact: libui has been one big reason why the 0.12.x series was started. I really wanted to solve the libui GUI situation finally, so that we can use this project on windows as well.

Major and minor Goals and Objectives for the studium-gem

This subsection will attempt to detail what the point of this project is. It will be a fairly long paragraph.

The Studium project, first and foremost, attempts to help with study- and exam-related topics in general.

What is meant with this?

Well - consider the possibility that you wish to prepare for some upcoming exam, going to occur in a few weeks from today. Perhaps you did build up some "flash card" mnemonics to remember questions and associated answers to these questions more easily. You want to train your theoretical knowledge in regards to these exam questions. Let's pick one exam topic, say: general chemistry. Ok, so ... this will be about chemistry-related knowledge.

You will probably learn more about atoms, the electrons that can be found in these atoms, the chemical reactions that the outer electrons may undergo in the course of a chemical reaction.

From this point of view, the studium gem is somewhat similar to other projects, such as Studyflix or StuDocu - these projects may also try to be of help in exam-related situations.

The primary purpose of the studium gem is to distribute the code (in ruby, and to some extent in java), the associated dataset (mostly text files, in particular yaml files) and also interconnect the various ruby files that are distributed with this project under the same "umbrella-project", for a unified approach and a unified use case.

The original goal for the Studium project, that is why it was started, was to bundle together knowledge from different topics - be these topics related to ruby, informatics, biology, chemistry, biotechnology, molecular biology, virology or physics, as an exam trainer mostly.

The objective here in this regard, as a trainer-for-upcoming-exams, was to improve the grades of the student at hand, and to be able to pass more exams within a given time span, thus making the time spent more "efficient" or worthwhile in this regard. (Evidently the user still has to invest time into learning on his or her own, so the studium-gem can only play a supportive role in this regard; it can not replace one's own impetus for wanting to learn more.)

Since then, this original use case has been extended quite a lot, including online-related aspects (make the dataset available via a web-interface, such as through sinatra), or via GUI bindings (primarily via ruby-gtk, but also via libui).

The Studium gem is made up of several different classes, that could potentially be of help to the user. The main toplevel "namespace" for the studium gem, in ruby, is simply "module Studium".

Note that not all the code may be needed for all use cases, so it is recommended to focus only on those parts that may be relevant for the user at hand, and simply ignore the other parts that seem of no use. People are different, so they may need different parts more so than others.

As a by-product of ruby being OOP-centric in nature, lots of different classes may typically reside in the same project; the studium project is no exception to that rule. In the event that you are curious about these classes, feel free to have a look at the right hand side of this gem's homepage, the Table of Contents. The direct URL for this is as follows:

https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/studium/

Furthermore, some classes are described in more detail in that file here (README.md), or respectively doc/README.gen, which is the template from which the README.md file is autogenerated upon publishing a new version of this gem. However had, do not expect a full explanation for all classes here; only some classes will be discussed in more detail. Otherwise the listing on this website may be way too long.

Note that there are a LOT of different classes and it is rather unlikely that you will need all of them, so don't focus on all classes with the assumption that they will all be equally useful. Some of these classes have only a very limited scope and use case, and thus are not too overly useful. Other classes are more important, though, and the page here attempts to focus primarily on these more useful classes, or rather, the functionality that these classes ultimately provide. It is hoped that this functionality may be of benefit to other people as well.

The major focus of the studium gem lies in regards to "flashcards", mnemo-cards, anki-cards - aka entries that have a registered question, and an associated answer to that question. (anki-cards are a bit different in that they focus on a GUI and allow such fancy things like embedding pictures; the studium project here also has this as a minor goal, but this comes only via GUI bindings, not the commandline variant, obviously. It is of a lower priority, though.)

These exam-related questions can be asked on the commandline, via a delay - usually a three seconds delay, but this can be toggled and changed by the end user on the commandline.

First, the question will appear on the commandline, and then, after that specified delay has passed, the answer will be revealed (and shown) on the commandline. This way the user can improve his/her knowledge on a daily basis. In fact: although I have not been studying at a university in many years, I still use this project almost daily to expand my own local knowledgebase.

You can query the current set delay via:

studium --delay?

Note that, in order for the question-answer "exam trainer" to work, you need to have written down these questions and answers somewhere. By default, I have bundled the dataset that I personally use, and distribute this with the gem. So you could re-use the same dataset that I use too. But this will probably be very useless to most other people (why should a student of law need extensive exam topics about physics, after all), so I recommend to keep your own dataset for question-answers instead. (Many of my own entries are also in the german language rather than in english, so this is another problem for many other people ... at any rate, feel free to re-use any of these questions as you like to, if you find them useful. As of March 2019, there are over 32.500 question-answers registered in the studium project, in various different topics. As of April 2023, there are now 45.704 question-answers available. I am going for 50.000, if only to see how this may affect the project overall, out of curiosity).

The format for question-answers is very simple:

• One question and one answer per given line. For example:

  • How does Rails call a "footer" on every page? Partials.

The above would constitute a question-answer exam entry. The tag called one will colourize it, via the first colour. Second colour tag would be via two and so forth - that way we can display colours on the commandline too.

The next screenshot shows this precisely:

The first part there constitutes the question; and the part after the first '?' character is the answer. The '?' token is not mandatory though; you can also substitute with 'A:' (which stands short for "Answer") and not make use of '?' at all.

Note that any words enclosed in double quotes "" will be colourized differently when displayed on the commandline. The reason for this is mostly so that it provides a stronger visual cue as to what may be more important in the given question/answer at hand. I found this helpful for memorizing when having these questions asked on the commandline; for some reason my brain reacts more strongly to colours. Probably does so for other people too, but again - if you dislike anything there, you can (and should) always use your own exam-dataset here.

Namespaces in the project

The main namespace for this gem is simply called Studium, which is german for studies. The gem could be renamed to Studies but considering the fact that the original use case was for universities in central europe, and many of the lectures stored in the main yaml file are for lectures in german, I think it would make sense to retain that name; you can always "alias" it like so, anyway:

Studies = Studium

The exam-relevant part resides under the Studium::Exams namespace. So when you see that latter namespace, you know that it has to be code that is specific to exams.

There are also some auxiliary classes, such as a primitive "statistical analyzer" of some sort, to rate the performance per day (from day to day, in regards to exam-questions that were answered).

Showing helpful information on the commandline

A general overview on the commandline, as to what the main functionality is, can be obtained through this entry point, aka --help:

studium --help

This will query bin/studium.

Constants and toplevel-variables used in the Studium project

The Studium project makes use of lots of constants, in the ruby code. This subsection mentions a few noteworthy ones - in particular those that may be useful to know in some later situations when you wish to "globally" change an aspect of the project.

The constant called MAKE_USE_OF_UNICODE_SYMBOLS_WHENEVER_POSSIBLE refers to unicode symbols. Elements such as the right-facing arrow, aka →. This can be useful as a visual cue.

If you wish to make use of more unicode symbols than retaining this constant to true is good. This is the default value too (true).

A toplevel query method exists as well - see:

Studium.shall_we_make_use_of_unicode_symbols?

The old constant called ARRAY_EXCLUDE_THESE was removed for the 0.10.x series. The old content was [ '[]','[skip]','[done]','X' ] but I decided that a trailing [] is ideal. The trailing [] marks the exam question at hand as "answered and thus solved". Back then I experimented with different, simple ways to mark an exam question as solved, but I came to the conclusion that a trailing " []" is probably the best way to indicate that. A trailing "X" alone can lead to confusion, when the answer itself has some upcased characters near the end and such. A unicode symbol could be used, but not every keyboard makes it easy to use that, so trailing [] seems better. The other variants, such as [skip] or [done] seem too long.

To query where the last exam question will be stored, use this method:

Studium.file_last_question_asked? # => "/root/Studium/last_question_asked.md"

This could be used if you forgot which question was the last one that was asked; or to automatically solve this question, via other scripts in the studium gem.

There is a very important file, called lecture_information.yml.

Since that file is so important for the Studium project, a toplevel instance variable keeps track of the path to this file (the location to that file):

@file_lecture_information = nil # nil here means "not yet initialized to any value"

On my home system and home setup, I also keep all exam-files stored in a specific location, which is revealed via:

Studium.file_exams? # => "/home/x/studium/YAML/exams.yml"

The path to this can be modified via:

Studium.set_file_exams()
Studium.set_file_exams(insert_path_here)

The Studium gem defaults to the UTF-8 encoding. As we require a bit of flexibility here (some users may want to use another encoding), the toplevel variable called @use_this_encoding stores which encoding is to be used for all code and data within the studium gem.

To query the current encoding in use, try this method:

Studium.encoding?

Exam dataset

The individual exam topics, such as for genetics or physics are stored in the subdirectory called exam_topics/.

I distribute the dataset for the topics that I have an interest in with this gem, which explains why the gem is quite large. This dataset will probably not be very useful for other people - after all you may not necessarily share my own interest in different topics - but if you want to use this project (such as for a base-system, and then modify and adapt it to your needs) then you are very much encouraged to build up your own dataset, anyway.

The primary reason as to why I have distributed my own dataset with this gem is to simply show how it can be done; it is just more convenient that way in the event that other people want to use the project and adapt it to their own needs. It makes it easier for people to figure out how to work with the project, by adding new questions. And, of course, since I use the gem almost on a daily basis, I polish the existing set of exam questions, so there is some quality control ongoing here as well.

The format for these exams must be a simple one, that is - one question and one answer per registered line. I currently encourage you to use not more than 1000 question-answer entries per such a file, as it becomes unwieldy otherwise, but if you want to, you can ignore this limitation as well. I just personally found it useful to have.

Whenever I have more than 1000 questions, I tend to create a new file with "advanced" exam-questions, or simply split things up in several different files. I did so for the metabolic pathways, for instance, such as for glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, and so forth. This started with a single file for biochemistry. Since then I split it up into several sub-topics, such as metabolism, advanced biochemistry and aminoacids, so the total question-answers for biochemistry is close to about 4000 as of now. (It may be even more than that if you also include molecular techniques and genetics into the field of biochemistry, which some university lectures may do. But I found it easier to use separate topics here, such as genetics, genomics and gene technology instead.)

If you want to query which exam-topic is the current default (the current studyset), then you can use the following invocation on the commandline:

studium --current-studyset?

How to best prepare for exams?

This probably depends on the type of person you are, how your brain works, how you memorize content. I can not give a general recommendation as to how that should be for everyone - you need to determine this on your own, for your particular case at hand.

But - what I believe may work very well for many different people, are so called "flash-cards", that is: you have the question on one side, and then the answer or answers on the other side of that card (flip card). For looking at the answer you simply flip around the card.

In my opinion, such mnemo cards or flash cards, are quite effective and may also work for you. This was the primary goal for the studium project too; it was built around that central concept for the most part, at the least in regards to exam questions.

Note that the python-software anki (anki cards) uses a somewhat related concept, although it is more sophisticated, e. g. you can embed images into the dataset, and so forth.

Flashcards (deprecated and removed)

Since as of March 2018, the studium project also supports flashcards formally.

Flashcards are mnemonic-cards, where a question may be on the front of a paper, and the answer to that question is on the backside.

Obviously computers can simulate this more easily without wasting paper - but some people may prefer oldschool paper for memorizing content.

At any rate, if you wish to add a new question-answer, then you can use this commandline invocation:

flashcards add

You can also add a new question via the bin/studium file:

studium --add-a-new-question

Internally this will call class AddExamQuestion. As of October 2020 I am not sure whether the namespace Flashcards will be retained, though. We may have to look how useful these flashcards are; at a later time it may be decided what to do with that, but it could be removed as well.

In March 2022 support for flashcards in the above described manner has been removed. Exam-question cards are similar to flashcards, so the functionality is not completely gone - but it is gone in the sense of "flashcard-centric design".

The main dataset (Studium.main_dataset?)

The file called lecture_information.yml is the most important yaml-file in this project. It stores all lectures that are tracked by the studium-gem.

Loading a big yaml file can take some time. Having to do so again and again may really slow down a project; it also makes little sense to want to do so, because you already had to load it up before, so why do it again?

Due to this situation, it seemed to make sense to allow a way to store the dataset in an instance variable on the toplevel namespace.

require 'studium/toplevel_methods/main_dataset.rb'
dataset = ::Studium.main_dataset? # ← Store it in a variable if you would like to.

lecture_information.yml

The file lecture_information.yml is extremely important and rather central to the studium gem, so this subsection will detail the rationale for this file and what information can be found in that file.

The file lecture_information.yml is distributed as part of the studium gem, in the yaml/ subdirectory specifically. You can have a look at it if you don't quite know the structure; perhaps use the editor nano or vim or emacs for a quick look.

In order to obtain the full path to this file, via the commandline, the following command can be used (commandline instruction):

studium --path-to-file-lecture-information

Essentially, lectures of universities can be registered in that file.

The basic format of that file is quite simple:

• The first line of every lecture-related entry, within enclosed "" quotes, constitutes the name of the lecture. Make sure that the name is exactly, 1:1, the official name of the lecture at hand. Make sure that the name really is the name of the lecture, too - awkward errors may otherwise be the consequence. From experience I can tell that the more accurate the dataset is in that yaml file, the better.

Then, additionally, you must *prepend the LV ID as the first entry in that particular line.

Complete example for this follows:

"301617 Strukturbiologie I":

So - first comes the particular LV ID entry and then comes the name of the lecture.

This is the main entry for that lecture in the .yml file.

Then, you can denote the content of the lecture at hand, via a Hash. You can use !ruby/symbol to use a symbol; it is a yaml file after all, with all pros and cons that come with it.

The three main entries are presently:

!ruby/symbol ects: 3.0
!ruby/symbol university: BOKU
!ruby/symbol language: german

More information can be added to describe the particular lecture at hand. See the file studium/doc/documentation_for_the_file_lecture_information.md for more information pertaining to this.

Why is this information about the available lectures so important?

The information stored in the file lecture_information.yml is important because it allows us to automatically calculate the ECTS points in a given curriculum, and also keep track whether a particular exam has already been passed successfully. (The latter part has to be adjusted to your own exam-dataset of course; it makes no sense for others to re-use my own dataset, as that is specific to my use case. Obviously different people will have totally other use cases.)

Some helper classes exist to sanitize or check the validity of the information contained in that file. For example, class Studium::AutopurgeThisLectureDate can be used to purge outdated lva-entries from the file, allowing you to more easily stay up-to-date with ongoing lectures.

(Obviously, for all of this to work, you need to have a file that keeps track of these different lectures in the first place.)

You can also check the validity of the file lecture_information.yml, from the commandline, through class Studium::CheckTheLectureInformationFile. This is described in the subsection checks and sanitizing information, in this document.

Note that you can also directly load the dataset from this file via the following method:

Studium.lecture_information

class Studium::FinishedExamsAtThisUniversity

class Studium::FinishedExamsAtThisUniversity can be used to show which exams at a university have been passed successfully.

require 'studium/utility_scripts/finished_exams_at_this_university/finished_exams_at_this_university.rb'
Studium::FinishedExamsAtThisUniversity.new(ARGV)
Studium::FinishedExamsAtThisUniversity.new('uniwien')
Studium::FinishedExamsAtThisUniversity.new('tu')
Studium::FinishedExamsAtThisUniversity.new('BOKU')

Note that there are a few other classes that have a similar functionality. It just seemed useful to also have an additional class that is dedicated to that particular task.

This class depends on Studium.sanitized_dataset_from_file_passed_exams_per_month, which in turn depends on a custom .csv file I use to keep track of my exams. Other users of this gem will not have this file, so a work-around has to be used in this case - simply pass the commandline flag --alternative to the class. It will then make use of the dataset stored in the file lecture_information.yml.

Regex-search for exams

You can search for passed exams via a "pseudo-regex", aka // in a string:

studium /Partial name of exam goes in here/
studium /Elektronen/
studium /Bioinf/

Let's look at the last example, on the commandline. This will send the first argument "/Bioinf/" to the ruby code that handles the commandline. ARGV is an Array that will hold the arguments given to a ruby .rb file as Strings, so we have a pseudo-regex there - a String object that starts and ends with the character '/'. We assume this String to be a regex, which conveniently allows us to query for the name of passed exams.

This may be helpful if you want to find all exams that you have passed successfully (and registered somewhere) but do not quite remember the full name of the exam. Or, as in the last example, to show all exams passed with a title that includes "Bioinf" (meaning Bioinformatics or Bioinformatik).

Of course this should be tailored to your exams, not mine or anyone else's exams. :)

You can also see the passed exams that belong to a given theme.

So for example, to show all exams that fit to the theme "chemistry", you can use this call to output these exams:

studium --passed-exams=chemistry

Flashcards / Mnemo-cards

The core of the studium project is to simulate the behaviour of mnemo-cards, memo-cards or flashcards (we will assume these names to be all synonymous to one another).

The project can thus ask the user a random exam question.

Then, if the correct answer to that exam question has been given, this question can be marked as "solved" - the code for the latter solved action resides in the file called solved.rb. It can be used from the commandline, or simply use bin/solved which provides this functionality.

Any exam question that has been marked as "solved" will no longer be within the total pool of questions that the computer will ask the user.

In other words, we can toggle on/off on a per question basis, via a trailing [] to a line in that file.

This allows you to systematically work through an exam dataset for a given topic at hand.

Currently there is a cap in effect - 1000 questions to the same topic, not more than that. This was mostly because I found it better to split up the topics, e. g. "basic chemistry", and then "advanced chemistry", and so on and so forth.

The exam dataset that I use myself is distributed with the studium gem, but it is probably not very useful to other users. I recommend that you maintain your own exam dataset - this will be much better suited to your own needs, so me providing my own exam dataset is mostly meant to serve as a "starter" for other people to do the same.

class Studium::AutoStud

The class AutoStud can automatically modify the cd_aliases yaml file. cd_aliases are part of another project and bundle together my cd-aliases, that is - aliases that help me navigate through my local filesystem quickly. I make heavy use of aliases in general.

If there is a file called exams.yml, then we can put numbers, so called "tag-identifiers", into these. So for example, we may have the entry '# === (13)' there. This means that pwdstud13 is an alias to this directory, which will correspond to an exam entry. These entries should be sorted in a way so that entry 1 means the next upcoming exam, entry 2 the one after that, and so forth and so on.

In the past, before 20.01.2018, I manually did most of the work there - first, by modifying exams.yml, and then by navigating towards the target directory, and then invoking "newstud NUMBER" here, such as newstud 13. This was tedious and somewhat error-prone, but mostly unnecessary. I then created class AutoStud, which allowed me to navigate to the directory at hand, and just take the name of the working directory to determine the number. But even that was too cumbersome, so I added a range specifier, such as:

autostud 1-15

This will, similar to a Range in ruby, work through from 1 to 15, and invoke class NewStud. This class is the one that will modify the cd-aliases file.

Even the range specifier was unnecessary since I added:

autostud --max

This will automatically guess what is the max entry and use that.

If the above subsection is a bit confusing, don't worry, it really is simple once you understand it. It essentially serves two purposes:

(a) to be able to show which exames are upcoming, via
    say, <b>d25</b> (see bin/d25 for that)
(b) to just quickly navigate to these directories
    for upcoming exams

I can then e. g. do "to4" to navigate to exam number 4 and look at the directory as to what material has been collected for this exam.

Obviously this works for the exam dataset on my system - you may have to maintain your own exams.yml file. I am willing to make improvements to this part, both in regards to code, but also in regards to the documentation.

Determine which curricula are used for which lecture

One of the most important files for this project, file lecture_information.yml, also contains the assigned curricula for a given lecture at hand.

The class Studium::DetermineCurricula can then be used to automatically output, on the commandline, in which curricula a certain lecture is listed. This allows us to batch-calculate the curricula used in an individual curriculum - e. g. if you design such a curriculum, the class may help you to automatically output from which other curricula certain lectures were used/re-used. This constitutes the "statistics" part of that class.

class Studium::ForeignLanguagePercentage

class Studium::ForeignLanguagePercentage can be used to show which lectures are in a given language, such as the english language.

This requires that the entry called "!ruby/symbol language: english" in the file lecture_information.yml has been set.

class Studium::ShowLecturesOnTheCommandline

This class will show lectures that are part of the given curriculum on the commandline. Additionally, a .html file can be autogenerated (and will be opened in the browser, if a certain constant has been set to true).

If a lecture has already been passed, then the remote URL will not be shown. This behaviour can be overruled from the commandline like so:

show_lectures_on_the_commandline --show-all-URLs --tuwienbiotech

This will show all remote URLs, even for lectures that were already solved.

Do note that you can also design any arbitrary "curriculum" on your own, and then load this dataset up.

Say that you have stored this into the file called foo.md.

To load this up, you can do:

studium --use-this-curriculum=foo.md

Remember to use only registered lectures (in the file lecture_information.yml), and only one lecture per line in that .md file (or any other text file).

class Studium::ShowLectures

class Studium::ShowLectures will show lectures according to a particular theme. For example, say that you want to see all lectures that have something to do with "analytical chemistry".

You could then invoke this class and pass in a commandline option such as the following one:

--analytical_chemistry

I have aliased the show_lectures.rb file, to the alias called show_lectures, and then I can do this from the commandline:

show_lectures --analytical_chemistry

(Actually, I even have this aliased, to "tanalytical" - the t stands for "theme". I use this for all the themes, e. g. "tgenetics" for all themes belonging to the theme genetics, "tinformatics" for all themes belonging to the theme informatics, and so forth.)

This class will also show a split between bachelor and master lectures. Bachelor lectures are shown first, then we will show the lectures belonging to a master curriculum.

This class thus allows us to quickly find out which lectures belong to a certain theme. It can then help when you wish to create an individual curriculum based on one or several certain themes - or when you simply want to see which lectures are available belonging to a particular theme. (I used it to see which exams I may do next, to fulfil a certain theme criteria.)

Note that this class acts on information, which must have been added prior to the file lecture_information, which is also distributed with this project. Always keep that file up to date - a lot of code in this project depends on that file.

Since as of 10.03.2018, you can also pass in the options --timetable or --upcoming. This will then autogenerate a .html file listening the coming exams. That functionality depends on class ShowLecturesOnTheCommandline.

class Studium::Exams::Cycle

The class Studium::Exams::Cycle can be used to cycle through the yaml file that holds which exams may be upcoming.

Since as of March 2018, the yaml file is distributed with the studium gem and can be found in the respective yaml directory, such as at:

studium/yaml/current_exams.yml

Obviously if you wish to make use of it, you will have to modify that file to fit your own preferences rather than mine. This also depends on the exam topics that you want to be exercising next.

The way how the class operates is really simple:

• After having asked one question from the current main topic, the class will move towards the next topic at hand, and so forth. When it reaches the "end", it will resume at the beginning, so in other words this is a cyclic array and the class operates via a "cyclic modus operandi" - which thus explains he name of this class: Cycle.

If you want to find out where the main .yml file resides, you can do so via:

Studium::Exams::Cycle.main_file?

If you want to display which entries are part of the current exam-cluster, you can do so from the commandline via:

studium --collage?

class Studium::ShowOutdatedLvaDates

class Studium::ShowOutdatedLvaDates can be used to show which lectures (lva aka "lehrveranstaltung") have outdated lva_dates entries.

That way the outdated entries can be updated (or removed).

This then allows other classes in the project to more reliably show only lectures that are up-to-date.

You can also query this from the commandline via the bin/studium executable, by issuing:

studium --outdated

class Studium::ShowLecturesOnThisDay

This class will show all lectures that occur on a given day. The format for that day must be in dd.mm.yyyy format such as 18.06.2018. (In the future this requirement may change and allow for other formats, such as yyyy.mm.dd; but for now, this is the only supported time format.)

The class will then proceed to check the file lecture_information.yml for matching entries. If found, they will be retained and lateron displayed, via the .report method.

You can either invoke the clas directly - it resides at studium/utility_scripts/show_lectures_on_this_day.rb - or you can invoke this functionality from the commandline.

The syntax for the commandline invocation can be in two formats.

studium --lectures-on-this-day=05.05.2018
studium 07.05.2018

The latter is significantly shorter and is recommended. It is the current default action for input in the form dd.mm.yyyy. Do note that this may, however had, also change in the future - but for now (March 2018), this is the documented default behaviour for input like the above. Use the more explicit one with the -- flags, since that one will be supported forever.

Studium.pristine

The toplevel-method made available through Studium.pristine can be used to create a new lecture_information file, from scratch.

The one that is, by default, bundled with the studium-gem is/was tailored to my own needs and use case. So if you want to use the file, it may be better to generate it once, and then modify that newly generated file on your own. (Don't forget to keep a backup of it available as well, in case it is deleted or overwritten accidentally.)

Note that you can invoke Studium.pristine() via the commandline as well, via:

studium --pristine
studium --new-lecture-information

You can then copy this file into the default location, where the file lecture_information.yml is normally stored, via:

studium --merge

Commandline examples of the studium gem

This subsection shows some commandline examples, in a succinct manner.

Display bachelor curricula, via the syntax --bachelor=NAME_HERE

studium --bachelor=vektorx
studium --bachelor=genetics

Display master curricula, via the syntax --master=NAME_HERE

studium --master=vektorx
studium --master=immunobio

Note that in both cases, the curriculum has to be registered.

If you wish to see which exams have been passed, that is, completed successfully, then use this invocation style:

studium --passed-exams?
studium --passed-exams

If you want to show how many ECTS points have been completed in the registered curricula, do either of the following:

studium --passed-ects?
studium --passed-ects

To show how many question-answers I added per year, on my own exam dataset, this can be used:

studium --questions-per-year

Studium.return_div_timetable_of_upcoming_exams

This module-method can show the upcoming exams, as a html table.

This allows you to look at the upcoming exams in a browser.

The priority of the given lecture must be among these values:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Thus, a priority value of higher than 5 will not be shown/considered.

Aliases

The studium-gem uses several aliases. These exist mostly for convenience.

For example, bin/studium has an entry point called --master-curricula. This variant also works via --master alone. The latter option is not explicitely mentioned since it is just an alias. If you think that a specific alias is missing, let me know and I will add it (as long as it does not conflict with any other entry point.)

Return all passed exams

If you need to obtain a list (an Array) of all exams passed, you can use any of the following two methods:

Studium.all_passed_exams
Studium.return_all_passed_exams

On the commandline, you can invoke this via:

studium --passed-exams
studium --all-passed-exams
studium --return-all-passed-exams

Note that this will only honour exams that have been registered in the file lecture_information.yml.

To show how many ECTS you have passed in all curricula, use this method:

Studium.show_passed_credits_per_curriculum

curricula.yml and registered curricula

The file curricula.yml collects the id-numbers of different bachelor/master curricula, from different universities, in Austria. It can be found under the yaml/ subdirectory.

In theory this file could be extended to also include EU-wide curricula listed, but I only limited it to my own potential use cases or that of (former) colleagues.

If other people want to add different curricula numbers, subdirectories may have to be created for each country - but for now, since nobody else may need more curricula, the current structure will remain as it is.

Do also note that within the yaml/ subdirectory, there is another directory called curricula/. The latter directory includes several curricula with the respective lectures that belong to this particular curriculum. These files are used to keep track of which lectures are part of these curricula and whether you have already successfully passed these or whether you have not.

Improving this project

If other people would like to make use of this this project, I am open for suggestions on how to make it more flexible.

Otherwise, I will just keep it here as it is, as I do (or rather, did) require it in a few of my other projects. And if nobody else uses it then this is also fine because I used to be the number one user here anyway - the project had to solve existing problems, and it did so fairly well. Extra work past this point (in the year 2018) is mostly done just to polish existing functionality, and to add a tiny bit of new functionality every now and then, or to improve the documentation. :)

I am also adding some code now and then for GUI and www-related use, as this interests me personally; but other than that, I consider the project mostly "done" in regards to time investment.

The method obtain_this_value_from_hash()

This method resides in the file studium/base/base.rb.

It was created in order to access the main Hash - that is, the Hash that is returned from the file lecture_information.yml.

I had to access the various entries from said file and this was becoming a bit tedious. It became even more tedious because some keys are Strings and some keys are Symbols. Since I did not want to look up all the time whether I am dealing with Strings or with Symbols, I transitioned into using that method instead.

It is thus a bit similar to HashWithIndifferentAccess, except that it is just a simple method (and the main name is actually obtain()).

Download the exam dataset

You can download the exam dataset by making use of this commandline option:

studium --download-exam-dataset
studium --download-dataset

This will copy into the exam_topics/ subdirectory, so make sure that you want this BEFORE calling the above. If in doubt, backup your exam dataset and store it elsewhere on top of that (which may be a good idea in general).

class Studium::ShowLecturesOfThisCurriculumId

class Studium::ShowLecturesOfThisCurriculumId can be used to output all lectures that belong to a particular curriculum ID. That way you can see which lectures could be done for a particular curriculum; and which lectures have already been passed in this curriculum, too.

You can input either the curriculum ID to this class; or some shortcuts.

The following input works on my home system, where show_lectures_of_this_curriculum_id is alias to the .rb file that holds class Studium::ShowLecturesOfThisCurriculumId can be used to output:

show_lectures_of_this_curriculum_id 066875
show_lectures_of_this_curriculum_id Bioinformatik
show_lectures_of_this_curriculum_id MolBio
show_lectures_of_this_curriculum_id Landschaftsplanung

Description of lectures

Some lectures are described in the file lecture_information.yml, but not all are. I have described only some which were of relevance to me. Most of these descriptions are in german, because the teaching language for most of these lectures is in german.

If you ever want to add your own descriptions, you can do so, by populating the entry called:

!ruby/symbol description: |

KDE Konsole support

In the past we could rename KDE Konsole tabs, but this behaviour is presently (November 2018) slightly buggy. I have thus disabled it.

It may be re-enabled one day in the future, but via a configuration setting, so that users can disable/enable it. By default it will then be disabled.

Studium::PassedEctsPerYear

If you need to find out how many ECTS points have been passed per given year for a particular curriculum then you can use class Studium::PassedEctsPerYear.

The input is the name of that curriculum. Obviously for this to work, the curriculum has had to be registered first.

You can also invoke it from the commandline, via:

studium --passed-ects-per-year

Display the amount of ECTS points passed in Bachelor/Master lectures

You can find out how many ECTS points were passed in Bachelor and Master lectures so far via:

studium --ects-bachelor-master

Using an environment variable to specify your replacement for lecture_information.yml

Some people may wish to use the project but wish to use another .yml file, other than the default one called lecture_information.yml. This is normally done so that you can, for example, add your own exam dataset into this .yml file (and have it persistent, that is, stored somewhere else on your filesystem, rather than use the bundled variant that comes distributed with the studium gem itself).

For people who require this, there exists an environment variable called STUDIUM_FILE_LECTURE_INFORMATION. Simply assign to this variable the full path to your dataset, which must be a .yml file in the same format.

Example for bash:

STUDIUM_FILE_LECTURE_INFORMATION=/opt/foo/bar.yml

class Studium::ShowCompletedEctsInAllCurricula

class Studium::ShowCompletedEctsInAllCurricula can be used to show the completed ECTS per curriculum, sorted by n ECTS (maximum amount of ECTS) first. This is really just an "overview" class that shall quickly tell you how many different curricula exist.

A threshold value ("cut off") exists, which is set to 5.0 ECTS by default. Only if you have passed exams worth a total of at the least 5.0 ECTS will they be shown. This is set via a constant which can be toggled.

class Studium::ShowConflictingLvaLectures

class Studium::ShowConflictingLvaLectures resides at the internal location studium/utility_scripts/show_conflicting_lva_lectures.rb, within the studium gem.

The purpose of this class is to show conflicting lva-lecture dates.

For example, say that you want to know whether there are any conflicts on the day 16.10.2018 (16th October in the year 2018). Then you would simply pass that string into class Studium::ShowConflictingLvaLectures and that class will then display which exams and which lectures are on that date, sorted by time.

Example:

conflict 16.10.2018

(I use the alias called conflict to invoke that .rb file from the commandline.)

The result, on the commandline, may look like this (for another day):

You can pass in any number of dates in the dd.mm.yyyy format, and the class will iterate through all of them and report which lectures and exams happen on each respective day.

You can use a range of dates too, if you pass in a - between two such dates.

Example:

conflict 16.10.2018-20.10.2018

This will be treated as if you would have given input from the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th. That can thus be used as a sort of "mini-calendar", on the commandline, in regards to important lectures/exams. (Remember that you will have to populate and maintain the dataset in the file called lecture_information.yml for this to work.)

You can also use a few abbreviations for class Studium::ShowConflictingLvaLectures.

For example, the capital letter A is a hardcoded entry that I may change to indicate which is the starting day of university in a given semster, such as 01.10.2018 or any such day. The capital letter B then refers to the day after that day, the capital letter C refers to the day after B, and so forth. The idea here is to use just a one-letter abbreviation rather than have to input 4 - 10 characters instead.

As already stated in this subsection, the file lecture_information.yml needs to have these lectures/exams registered first, before class Studium::ShowConflictingLvaLectures is able to display them.

Why was this class added? I needed that functionality to plan exam-dates ahead of time. That way I could display which exams may be upcoming and so forth - helped me in regards to time management.

Underline-support for exam questions

You can use udtest*/ud* or utest*/u* to use underline-support in KDE konsole for question-answer combinations. (I can not use tags here in markdown, or so it seems, so assume that ud stands for the corresponding tag.)

Studium::ShowLecturers

class Studium::ShowLecturers will show the lecturers of each lecture in a given curriculum, on the commandline/terminal.

If an entry is missing the lectures then this will be reported on the commandline.

The idea behind this class is mostly to allow you to quickly find out which lecturer holds which particular lecture (and when).

It is not a too terribly useful class, though - mostly exists just for sake of completeness.

Registered URL entries to the (registered) lectures

Since as of 15.04.2019 (April 2019) it is possible to return the remote URL of a given registered lecture, through the Studium module.

Let's first show an example for this, including the toplevel API:

Studium.return_remote_homepage_of_this_lecture "270016 Massenspektrometrie" # => "https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/course.html?lv=270016&semester=2019S"
Studium.return_remote_homepage_of_this_lecture "Massenspektrometrie"        # => "https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/course.html?lv=270016&semester=2019S"

As you may be able to see, we take a shorter input string, aka the name of the lecture at hand, and then return the remote URL for that lecture. In particular the second example shows how you can use a partial input, and still obtain the current remote URL associated with that course.

This requires that a key called :homepage registered exists for that particular lecture in the file lecture_information.yml.

Right now only a very few lectures contain such an entry, but I will extend on this slowly, as time permits. The long term goal will be to provide a remote URL to all registered lectures. (This was already possible through the BeautifulUrl project, but I realized that it may be better to a) register this directly within the Studium project and b) to not depend on other projects if possible).

Encoding

The default encoding for the Studium gem used to be the encoding ISO-8859-1, aliased onto the constant called ENCODING_ISO. This setting (constant) can be found in the file studium/encoding/encodings.rb

Since as of May 2019 the default encoding is now UTF-8.

In the event that you may wish to use another encoding, you can modify the yaml file called default_encoding.yml, at studium/yaml/default_encoding.yml. Simply add the name of the constant there.

The reason why I personally used ISO-8859-1 as encoding is because german umlauts can be a hassle under UTF when combined with an old editor I used to use. I finally abandoned that editor in 2019 and am now using another editor, so it was also possible to switch to UTF-8. Unicode/UTF has quite a massive intrinsic complexity, but it also has some useful things, such as emojis and unicode characters, which can be used on the terminal in a colourized manner. That was actually the primary reason why I switched into UTF-8, as odd as that may sound.

The Studium project will continue to allow any other encoding though, as long as it is supported by ruby itself.

For the time being, there also exists a commandline way to change the encoding in use for the Studium project.

studium --encoding=utf
studium --encoding=iso1

If you are fine with UTF-8 then obviously you do not have to change anything.

Studium::SolvedEctsPerUniversity

If you have solved ECTS credits at different universities, and registered this in the file lecture_information.yml, then this class will give a little summary on the commandline as to the number of ECTS points solved at different universities.

Logging activities done within the Studium project

The Studium project will try, by default, to log a lot of information that may be useful in some cases. This is not a trivial task, because there are many different classes that make up this project.

The paragraph here aims to explain some of the rationale behind the logging.

class Studium::Log::StoreLastQuestionAskedIntoFile will store the last exam-question asked into a file, together with the time stamp. This can then be used to answer questions such as "have I already asked myself this question today?". So this may help for training purposes, e. g. when you wish to acquire some knowledge, and learn for new questions that way.

Studium.find_corresponding_exam_topic

The toplevel method Studium.find_corresponding_exam_topic is mostly a convenience method. It will accept an input, ideally a String, and return back the official, registered name of the particular exam topic at hand.

For example, 'genetik' as input to this method will become 'allgemeine_genetik', which is also the locally existing name for the exam-file at hand.

The idea behind that method is that we can take a shorter input, and still obtain the real filename. This is convenient because you can type just a few characters, and have the name of the exam-file returned. It allows us to be lazy here.

This is especially useful on the commandline, but it is also useful to aggregate it together in different ruby files of this project, and present a "unified" API for this topic.

Note that since as of 09.11.2019 (9th of November), the number of available exam-topics as part of this project are calculated automatically. Prior to that a constant was used that was hand-counted manually by me, which was too tedious and error-prone - so the new approach should work better for more exam topics in the future.

Studium.find_corresponding_exam_title

The method Studium.find_corresponding_exam_title() can be used to return the full, spelled out name of the exam topic at hand.

Let's showcase two examples next - these may explain what this method does more succinctly so:

title = Studium.find_corresponding_exam_title('technische_grundlagen_der_informatik') # => "Technische Grundlagen der Informatik"
title = Studium.find_corresponding_exam_title('mphysio') # => "Mikrobielle Physiologie"

As can be seen, a short input, such as mphysio, will be translated into Mikrobielle Physiologie properly. I needed this in order to show the exam topic at hand; showing mphysio was not as useful as showing Mikrobielle Physiologie instead (which, by the way, is german for microbial physiology, that is metabolic pathways used by microorganisms).

Studium::Exams::PushSolvedQuestionsOnTop

class Studium::Exams::PushSolvedQuestionsOnTop has a very simple objective: it will move all lines ending with ' []' to the top of a given file, if at the least one ' []' is encountered in that file. Note that "top of the given file" specifically excludes comments, that is lines starting with # in that file, and the first line after that '#' comment, which is just a newline for readability reasons usually.

The idea behind this class is really just to be able to quickly reshuffle all solved questions towards the top of the file; the unsolved questions will then be at the bottom of the file.

I needed this functionality because it allows me to quickly re-structure existing question-answers, into different topics/themes.

On my home system, I aliases it to ontop simply.

Display the upcoming exams, via the timetable

You can show the list of upcoming exams via:

studium --timetable

Note that this makes use of the information stored in the file called lecture_information.yml, which has to be maintained by someone. In this case, I am still maintaining the dataset stored in that file (in the year 2019) - but this may not be the case at a later time, so ideally someone else should be able to maintain that file, or just anyone. I will add sufficient documentation to explain what has to be done, in order to maintain that single file.

At any rate, the class that is responsible for interpreting the dataset stored in that .yml file, is class Studium::Exams::UpcomingImportantExams.

This is the very same class that is invoked by issuing studium --timetable.

The exam dates should ideally follow the dd.mm.yyyy notation, that is day.month.year.

An example will be given next. Say that you have a course called Physics for Engineers. Two exams for this course are upcoming, which you may wish to register in the above-mentioned yaml file, like in such a way:

"Physics for Engineers":
- "02.02.2018"
- "02.03.2018"

The above means that the next exam for the course "Physics for Engineers" will occur at the beginning of february; and then the next exam will be at the beginning of march, and so forth. You should sort this by date.

In the .yml file, the exam-related entries are called exams: and should denote an Array.

Once the exam has been registered like that, class Studium::Exams::UpcomingImportantExams will make use of the information. That's about it for that class. :)

Graphviz: generating module dependencies

Since as of December 2019 it is possible to generate a module dependency image (as a .png file). This depends on the project called ImageParadise, and on the program called graphviz.

The code works, but it is not really optimized or very flexible. Consider it more as a proof-of-concept for the time being - perhaps in the future this may be extended.

(Note that most of the code for this can be found in the image_paradise gem; the studium gem only generates the Hash that is passed into image_paradise, and it is then the responsibility of image_paradise to generate the image file at hand.)

Evaluating the progress in different curricula

You can evaluate your progress in different curricula via class Studium::CurriculumComparer. This class resides within the statistics/ subdirectory of this gem.

In order for this class to work properly, all your successfully completed lectures have to be registered in the file lecture_information.yml prior to using that class. (Thus, you need to use your own dataset, but this is the only sensible thing to do; it would not make a lot of sense for you to use my dataset, since that makes no sense for your particular progress in your own studies. People will have to maintain their own dataset here.)

The class will then output which curricula have the highest amount of successfully completed ECTS points, sorted first. That way you can assess how far you have gotten in this or that curriculum so far.

Deprecations within the Studium gem

This subsection may eventually contain deprecations within the Studium gem itself.

• class Studium::Exams::ShowExamThemes was deprecated on 01.06.2020; most of its functionality was integrated into class Studium::Exams::ShowThemes. The new code is better than the old code, in my opinion. Less confusing.

The file participating_in_these_courses.yml was removed. Users now have to designate whether they participate in a university course with the corresponding LV-entry in the file lecture_information.yml.

The two constants STORE_LAST_QUESTION_ASKED_WHERE and FILE_LAST_QUESTION_ASKED were removed. Use the toplevel-method Studium.file_last_question_asked? instead if you want to find out where the last exam question is stored.

Sinatra interface

The Studium project has a small sinatra interface, which can be started like this from the commandline:

studium --sinatra

(If this fails, try to reload again. On my system I have tied this to open it in the browser the moment sinatra is started, and this takes perhaps two or there seconds.)

Note that the sinatra-interface is fairly minimal, but it can be used to display different curricula. Expect this to be improved in the long run (past June 2020).

Determining the name of a curriculum

If you have a use case for determining (and returning) the name of a curriculum, you can do this:

require 'studium/toplevel_methods/name_of_this_curriculum.rb'

Studium.name_of_this_curriculum
Studium.name_of_this_curriculum(:indi2)
Studium.name_of_this_curriculum(:tu_wien_chem) # => "Technische Chemie"

class Studium::Exams::UpcomingExams

class Studium::Exams::UpcomingExams can report which exams are upcoming, via a HTML table.

class Studium::Calendar

class Studium::Calendar attempts to display which courses are upcoming, so that you can plan ahead. It currently works only on the commandline, but in the future ruby-gtk bindings and a sinatra-web-interface may be added - we'll see.

The main dataset for this class is derived from the file called participating_in_these_courses.yml. The key that is listed there will become the full name.

The class was added in September 2020, so expect things to not work pefectly well for the time being - it will be improved upon at a later time.

Showing all STEOP lectures of a curriculum

You can show all STEOP lectures that are in a curriculum.

Issue something like the following on the commandline:

steop_lectures --curriculum1
steop_lectures --curriculum2 # number-input should work
steop_lectures --ktww
steop_lectures --lbt # Bachelor Biotech-Curriculum at the BOKU
steop_lectures --AW # as should abbreviations; AW is "Agrarwissenschaften"
steop_lectures_in_this_curriculum --ktww

Where steop_lectures is an alias to where class Studium::SteopLecturesInThisCurriculum resides - usually in the file studium/steop/steop_lectures_in_this_curriculum.rb.

If you want to show all steop-lectures in the current semester, consider using Studium::SteopLvaDates.new.

Semesterplaner - planning a given semester (half-year) at a university

There is a class that may try to plan ahead for a given semester at a university. This class is not very flexible and such but the code could be improved.

See:

require 'studium/utility_scripts/semesterplaner.rb'
Studium::Semesterplaner.new

Display exam statistics

To show the exam statistics, try:

Studium.show_exam_statistics

class Studium::ShowLvaDatesOfThisLecture

If you need to show the LVA dates of a given lecture at hand, on the commandline, then you may want to use class Studium::ShowLvaDatesOfThisLecture, defined in the file studium/utility_scripts/show_lva_dates_of_this_lecture.rb.

The usage for this class is quite simple - pass in the name of the lecture that you are interested in, such as "Primatologie".

If you want to get the most accurate information, then you should ideally also pass in the lecture ID; such as in the above example with "Primatologie", the input string should be in the form of:

"300227 Primatologie"

We call the "300227 Primatologie" variant as the full input and the variant with "Primatologie" alone as partial input. If only a partial input is provided, then the script will try to be greedy and find as many relevant entries as possible. This can be used as a feature too.

For example, consider that show_lva_dates_of_this_lecture is an alias to the above .rb file, then the following commandline use:

show_lva_dates_of_this_lecture Geneti

would show all lectures that have the tag "Geneti" included.

Note that you do not necessarily need an alias such as show_lva_dates_of_this_lecture; you can also invoke it from the commandline, as the following example shows:

studium --show-lva-dates-of-this-lecture=Primatologie
studium --show-lva-dates-of-this-lecture="300227 Primatologie"

To use it in ruby code, try something like this:

require 'studium/utility_scripts/show_lva_dates_of_this_lecture.rb'
result = Studium::ShowLvaDatesOfThisLecture.new("802300 Biological nanosciences and nanotechnology (in Eng.)")

Expanding time ranges

Consider the situation where a student participates in a lecture requiring practical work time, such as by being active in a laboratory, with a time schedule requiring the students to begin early morning, and work until the late evening, over a time period of three weeks. (This is just an example to illustrate this subsection here; the use case is explained.)

You may see that the school/university displays the specific dates online via something like:

15.10. - 2.11.2020,

Exactly like this (this is actually a copy/pasted "real-world" example, including the trailing ',').

What does the above mean? Well, it means that the course will begin at the 15th of october, in the year 2020 (this is the dd.mm.yyyy notation which is in general used in europe).

The - in between means "up until" and the end date is specified to be at the second of november, in 2020.

Since I needed to quickly convert such short, one-line dates of a given course into a specific time for use in a calendar-like application, I needed a class that can output an Array of dates where this course will be held. So, class Studium::ExpandTimeRange was created to tackle this problem.

This class will accept such odd input as the last example, and then output an Array that can be used in a yaml file, of the specific dates, weekend-names associated with that day and the time. This then allows me to quickly copy/paste this into the corresponding yaml file. (I needed to have this expanded to every day because I also visually have to look at that yaml file. For this, it does help to have every day listed as-is, rather than specify a range such as 02.11-04.12.)

Internally you can also use the following toplevel-method:

Studium.expand_time_range()
Studium.expander()

Use whichever variant you prefer - the last method is quite short though, so you can use it like this:

Studium.expander('15.10. - 2.11.2018')

This also works over the commandline, of course:

studium --expand-time-range="15.10. - 2.11.2018,"
studium --expander="15.10.-2.11.2018"

Querying whether a student is registered for a particular exam

To query and thus determine whether you are registered for a particular exam, use this method:

Studium.registered_for_this_exam?
Studium.registered_for_this_exam? "892104 Physik (LBT)"

Note that in order for this to work, the information has to be registered for that particular course, e. g. as registered - that is typically found right above the exams setting, if it exists.

class Studium::GenerateSpreadsheet

The idea for class Studium::GenerateSpreadsheet was to generate a spreadsheet (LibreOffice excel file) for individual curricula automatically. This works partially in the sense that the generated file is correct, but its visual looks are not necessarily ... awesome. If you need to use it, I recommend to use this only as a blueprint, and make enhancement to the generated file manually.

Reporting all lectures that match to a specific lecture type

If you need to find out all registered lectures that match a particular type, such as 'VO', or 'UE' or 'VO+SE', then you can use the following toplevel-method:

Studium.report_all_lectures_matching_this_lecture_type('VO+SE')

The latter was the primary reason why this method has been added; I needed to find out all lecture types that are of combined VO + SE style ("VO" for "Vorlesung", "SE" for "Seminar").

Report how many ECTS were solved per university

This can be done via:

Studium::EctsPerUniversity.new

Or via the commandline, through bin/studium:

studium --ects-per-university

Showing the weekly lectures

In order to show the weekly lectures, you can use class WeekParser.

class Studium::UpcomingMandatoryPresenceCourses.new

class Studium::UpcomingMandatoryPresenceCourses.new can be used to show the upcoming courses that require your physical presence. By default this class will "peek ahead" 40 days into the future; this can be modified via the method .set_n_days_into_the_future().

You can also invoke this on the commandline via:

studium --mandatory

Working with a curriculum

From the ruby side, you can do this:

require 'studium'

this_curriculum = Studium::Curriculum.new(:bachelor_vektoren)

Studium.backup_this_exam_file

The method Studium.backup_this_exam_file() may be used from various classes, but most importantly it is used by class AskExamQuestion. The idea here is to first back up the old exam question file, before making any changes. That way you can restore to the prior file, if you ever need to.

Marking all exam questions of a given topic to solved

If you want to mark all questions of a particular topic to "solved" then you can try this:

qa agrarmarkt --ALL_SOLVED
qa agrarmarkt --all-solved

This will solve all topics from agrarmarkt to solved.

Internally this will ensure that each line has a trailing [].

Colours

The colours within the Studium project are handled in two main ways:

 (1) By an external gem called colours

 (2) Internally in most classes of this project via the @use_colours instance variable.

In other words, if the toplevel instance variable @use_colours is set to false then the Studium project/namespace will not use colours at all. That way you can disable colours for the whole project. This may be useful if you use the project in sinatra or rails and so forth.

In ruby code you could invoke the following method in order to achieve this:

Studium.disable_colours

By default, on the commandline, for exam questions and exam answers to said question, colours can be defined by the user, through the file called studium/yaml/custom_colours.yml.

That file has keys such as colour_for_answers and colour_for_answers, which denotes the colour to be used for when a question is asked and an answer to that question is revealed, on the commandline.

Currently this defaults to olivedrab for exam-questions and lightslategray for exam-answers, but you can use any other colour code here if you would like to. These HTML names are the preferred variants; if you need a link to these names, you could use this one here https://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_hex.asp.

So, for example, that yaml file will have these entries:

colour_for_questions: olivedrab
colour_for_answers: lightslategray

You can also change these colours through the commandline, as the next examples will demonstrate.

Examples:

studium --use-this-colour-for-exam-answers=slateblue
studium --use-this-colour-for-exam-questions=grey

Do note that you can "style" exam questions and exam answers in various ways. For example, if you use "" quotes, then another colour will be used (this is no longer the case as of October 2020, though; you need to use HTML names instead, or special tags such as <one>).

If you use a tag such as and (a html pseudo-tag, u meaning underline), then the word will be underlined. You can also add HTML colours, such as <slateblue> this will be in slateblue colour. The latter variant may become shorter in the future, such as <slateblue >foo</> or something like that - but for now, you have to use the name of the HTML colour both in the opening and in the closing tag.

GUI - Graphical User Interface

The studium gem comes with a few GUI bindings, primarily based on those bindings available to ruby. Although using java is an option - and then using swing - at present no effort is made to add a GUI in java or jruby.

The current focus in this project, in regards to graphical user interfaces (in the year 2021) is on GTK, in particular via the ruby-gtk3 bindings, which in turn depend on gobject-introspection.

Since as of July 2022 the older ruby-gtk2 bindings were removed. The ruby-gtk3 bindings were of a much higher quality anyway and it is a waste of time to maintain ruby-gtk2 code. Note that my other project called gtk_paradise will continue to support ruby-gtk2 - I just don't think ruby-gtk2 will be useful for the studium gem anymore past July 2022.

Further GUI elements may be added in the future, such as more sinatra-specific code, more .cgi files, perhaps rails as well, and libui. The latter works on windows out-of-the-box if you do "gem install libui", which is a huge plus.

If you want to make use of the GTK bindings then you currently need the gtk_paradise gem, so make sure to install it first. Prior to that you will also need to have the necessary gtk-files, headers and what not. Your distribution (if you use Linux) may have packaged these for you, so research this a little how to obtain all necessary files. I myself tend to compile from source, so I don't really know the names of the packages different distributions use here.

The main GUI widget for asking exam questions currently (at the least past February 2021) looks like this:

In September 2021 this was enhanced a bit and should look slightly better now:

(Don't mind the answer in the above screenshot being wrong; the lower input-field is just for giving an answer before hitting the reveal button to check whether you gave the correct answer. It's a training system, so of course wrong answers may be given. The above image is mostly about showcasing the functionality as such.)

Note that a .css file covers most of the display settings, so users of the studium gem could, in principle, adjust it to their liking via a CSS file. I am willing to change the widget composition and functionality as-is, and offer ad-hoc loading of .css files if this is wanted, but most of the time I just use the commandline variant only, anyway.

Since as of September 2021 a variation exists, called FastAskExamQuestion. The old GUI was becoming slow, for some awkward reason, so I simplified it, removed some features - it should now be more responsive. It may not be as convenient to use, but if you only want a simple GUI for exam-questions then consider making use of FastAskExamQuestion rather than AskExamQuestion.

It now looks like this:

It now has fewer features, but I think it looks better organized now, and most importantly it is faster. Perhaps the issue was unrelated to that widget; either way this new variant will probably retained in the long run.

The current (August 2021) variant of libui looks like this:

Yes, that looks like crap and it is incomplete - but the big win is that this will also work on windows, out of the box, without any further ado. The idea here is that windows users can now work via a GUI tool past this point. ruby-gtk3 works very well on Linux, but I could not get GTK to work on windows, despite the so-called 'official guide' for msys2. Thanks to libui it is no longer necessary to wait until I get gtk to work on windows - it now works as-is.

You may still want to distribute - or use - an .exe file on windows. This is possible if you use the ocra gem.

If you are on windows, then run bin/studium like this:

ruby studium --create-executable

This should build an .exe file that can be started.

(That .exe currently, in August 2021, does not work perfectly well. I have to fix some related ruby code first, but starting the libui-widget directly via ruby works fine - I tested that on windows too.)

The toplevel-method Studium.filter_away_invalid_questions

The toplevel-method Studium.filter_away_invalid_questions(), defined in the file studium/toplevel_methods/filter_away_invalid_questions.rb, is used to filter away invalid questions.

This essentially removes any empty lines or lines starting with the # character, which is assumed to be a comment.

After this method has been invoked on a dataset, it is assumed that this dataset will contain only valid (legal) exam questions.

You can tap into the following method to determine the path to the exam topics:

Studium.path_to_the_exam_topics?

So you can then read in the exam-topic file, call the Studium.filter_away_invalid_questions() method, and then randomly select a remaining exam topic to ask.

To obtain a random exam topic, use this API:

Studium.random_exam_topic? # => "epigenetik"
Studium.random_exam_topic? # => "abfall_als_ressource"
Studium.random_exam_topic? # => "embryologie_und_entwicklung"

Statistical information within the Studium project

The Studium project also allows for a few statistical information in regards to the project, e. g. such as how many exams were passed in this or that period of time. You can also show the curricula used for any given individual curriculum at hand.

The latter feature can be invoked such as is shown next:

studium --statistics

This will tap into class Studium::DetermineCurricula.

What about "how many exam questions can a human being solve per given day"? Well, this is a generic question really, and it will depend on the individual. Some people learn faster than others, for many reasons. The dataset I compiled for myself is not applicable to many other people - you'd need to do so consistently and study a whole cohort of people, in order to answer this question.

But if we ignore the cohort-situation, just for me, personally, I found a few interesting facts. In November 2021 the maximum exam-questions answered for me were 10.729. In February of 2020 I reset that counter to 0, for various reasons. Then I resumed answering exam questions. In November 2021 I broke 10.000 again, so the number of 10.729 is not a fluke - it's a real number for at the least my own situation. So, answering 10.000 exam questions may take me about a year and a half, give or take. (Remember that I did not necessarily answer the same exam questions again, so I may be above 11.000 right now, most likely.)

So, if I estimate, in 18 months I answer 10.000 questions, and 18 months have roughly 18*30 540 days, then I can answer 10_000 / 540.0 18.5 exam questions per day. Keep in mind that I did not answer exam questions on every day, and I wasn't really pushing this every day either, so this is more a relaxed approach. So a human being can very easily learn something new every day, with about 20 exam questions per day at minimum. (I consider myself average in this regard, so tons of people will have better numbers than these.)

This statistic may be fairly useless for others to know, but I find it quite interesting nonetheless. Imagine if I would have started with this when I was a little kid - my current knowledge would be significantly larger than what I have available right now. Whether the time investment pays off in the long run is hard to say - after all you also learn something new anyway, even without exam questions. Think about mechanical repair knowledge, which you can not easily obtain just from reading text; you need the physical practice too. But specifically for exam-related topics, where only theoretical knowledge is to be considered, this is quite helpful, in my opinion.

My next goal is to break 15.000 and then 20.000. Let's see how long this will take. :)

class Studium::Exams::ExamQuestion

class Studium::Exams::ExamQuestion has been written in January 2022. It replaced two older classes which formed the foundation of the "ask an exam-question" functionality.

The primary reason why it was rewritten was because there were several bugs in regards to coloured output on the commandline, via ANSI escape sequences. These bugs were fixed during the rewrite. \o/

The class, called from the commandline, may generate a question/answer output such as the following:

This shows the question on top, and then the revealed answer below, via colours. The colours can be customized a little via a .yml file.

class Studium::Exams::Solved

Since as of January 2022, class Studium::Exams::Solved will be more verbose if you call it from the commandline via:

solved --be-verbose

I needed this because there were some bugs that had to be removed, and it seemed more convenient to let this class respond to some user-given commands.

Creating a SQL database

The exam-questions that are distributed by the studium gem can be turned into a .sql database (SQL).

A helper script exists to do this, at the file location studium/utility_scripts/create_database.rb. If you run it a .sql file will be created, which is quite large - around 10MB in size or more as of January 2024. This can then be read into a sqlite database or a PostgreSQL database or another SQLite-centric database.

Creating a new .sql database takes quite some time, though. Presently (in 2024) I don't have a better solution for this problem.

If you want to create such a SQL database (as a file) on your own host system, first invoke that .rb file (see the path mentioned above), which is also possible via the commandline, as-is, via:

studium --create-database

Then this new .db file will be automatically created. But again, be warned, this takes quite some time. (If this does not work then simply invoke the .rb file directly; this will give you the .sql file).

The file allowed_themes_for_courses.yml

The file allowed_themes_for_courses.yml lists the allowed themes for exams. For instance, a lecture that deals with Genetics and Cell Biology, may have as allowed themes at the least these two topics (e. g. - genetics and - cell biology).

The reason why this yaml file exists is so that we can use this to search for lectures that include these topics. So, in some ways, this is for the use case as a meta-tagger.

The file curricula.yml

The file curricula.yml will keep all Curricula entries for curricula in Austria. This is mostly done so that we have these curricula registered, via number mapping to the corresponding name.

Last saved into which file

Whenever you ask an exam-question, it is kept track into which file that exam-question will be stored. The toplevel API Studium.last_saved_into_which_file? can be used to query this.

It would then yield a path such as:

/home/x/programming/ruby/src/studium/lib/studium/exam_topics/basic_chemistry

class Studium::SearchFor_nECTS

class Studium::SearchFor_nECTS can be used to show all lectures having the specified n ECTS credits.

So for example:

Studium::SearchFor_nECTS.new(1)

would show all lectures having 1.0 ECTS points.

You can invoke this class from the commandline as well, of course. The name of the executable is n_ECTS, residing at bin/n_ECTS.

I aliased this executable to nects on my home system, and can then do the following as-is:

nects 1.0 --master --show-numbers

This would show all lectures belonging to a master-curriculum having 1.0 ECTS points. Additionally, the leading LVA ID numbers will be shown as well.

Studium::Statistics::TopStats

class Studium::Statistics::TopStats can be used to display the percentage value of questions answered in the registered exam topics. The purpose is to, simply and quickly, show the performance over the registered exam-topics in use.

Invocation example from ruby code:

Studium::Statistics::TopStats.new(ARGV)

The following small image shows how this may look, being applied onto the exam-dataset that I use normally:

Studium.report_solved_topics

The solved topics can be quickly displayed if you use the following file and code:

require 'studium/toplevel_methods/report_solved_topics.rb'
Studium.report_solved_topics

class Studium::Exams::MandatoryContinuousAssessment

class Studium::Exams::MandatoryContinuousAssessment can be used to handle lectures that require mandatory attendance (in german "prüfungsimmanente Lehrveranstaltungen").

The section here does not include all options that this class is able to handle; instead, only a select subset will be shown and explained here.

If you want to show which mandatory courses may be upcoming, sorted on the assigned priority, then you can do this:

mandatory --upcoming

The command mandatory is an alias I use to the .rb file that holds class Studium::Exams::MandatoryContinuousAssessment.

You can also compare (some of) the registered curricula, by issuing:

mandatory --compare

This will output the amount of ECTS points stored in courses that require a mandatory attendance.

If you want to also see the individual lectures and courses that were used to determine all courses requiring mandatory presence, you can use the following commandline switch:

mandatory --compare-detail
mandatory --compare-stats
mandatory --details

On a side-note: if you wish to see some mandatory lectures, such as those that belong to the lecture type VO+SE, you can pass this as input to bin/studium, like so:

studium VO+SE

You can also query "which mandatory lectures are offered in the summer semester" and combine it with "which mandatory lectures are offered at the TU Vienna, via:

mandatory --tuwien --summer

Of course you need to have them registered first, such as in the file lecture_information.yml, if you wish to adapt it to your own universities. The default datset focuses on universities in Austria only. But that yaml file can be of help if you want to adjust it to your own use cases.

Studium::SetAliasesBasedOnThisFile

This class can be used to batch-assign the main aliases used for asking exam questions, if a file called "exam_topics.md" exists. Alternatively you can pass in another file that is then used instead.

So, rather than doing:

setalias1 chem1

I can batch-assign different exam topics based on one-entry-per-line instead.

This file allows me to store exam topics in an ordered manner, such as first line is topic1, second line is topic2 and so forth. Then, once that has been done, I can hit the number 1, and the first exam question will be asked (belonging to topic2). Or I hit number 2 and the second exam topic will be asked, and so forth.

The idea behind this is that I can use the keys 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 to ask exam questions and thus train my memory in this regard. It's like an interactive trainer. If I want another dataset then I modify the .md file and re-assign. I also keep exam themes together, e. g. all subtopics that belong to biochemistry as a topic, or to cellbiology, or to genetics and so forth. It may be a bit difficult to explain if you have never tried this, so you can give it a try from the commandline perhaps - I use this almost daily on linux, so it has become "second nature" really.

class ExamRegistrationAt

class ExamRegistrationAt can show upcoming exams. You need to store this information in the file lecture_information.yml, so there is some time investment to be done, before class ExamRegistrationAt is useful for you. But, once you register upcoming exams there, class ExamRegistrationAt can show which exams are the next upcoming ones. This helps allow to plan time for these exams.

Now - there are two constants that determine how many days ahead into the future this class will "look". So, for instance, if you want to see only upcoming exams for the next 90 days, then you should store this information in one of these two constants.

The two constants are:

LOOK_N_DAYS_INTO_THE_FUTURE
LOOK_N_DAYS_INTO_THE_PAST

The first one is much more relevant; the second one is not so relevant (and it was only added fairly recently, in May 2022. The primary reason why the second constant was added was as an ad-hoc solution to not show outdated exam entries.).

The following curricula have been completely integrated into the Studium gem so far

The following table lists which curricula have been integrated fully so far, as of June 2022:

Number	Name of the Curriculum	Curriculum Number	University	URL to the curriculum
1	Bachelor LMBT	033 217	BOKU	https://boku.ac.at/fileadmin/data/H01000/mitteilungsblatt/MB_2019_20/MB17/033_217_Bachelorcurriculum_LMBT_2020U.pdf
2	Bachelor Umweltingenieurwissenschaften	033 231	BOKU	https://boku.ac.at/fileadmin/data/H01000/mitteilungsblatt/MB_2020_21/MB17/Bachelorcurriculum_UIW_033_231_2021U.pdf
3	Bachelor Agrarwissenschaften	033 255	BOKU	https://www.boku.ac.at/fileadmin/data/H01000/mitteilungsblatt/MB_2017_18/MB20/033_255_Bachelorcurriculum_AW_2018U.pdf
4	Bachelor Technische Chemie	033 290	TU	http://www.tuwien.ac.at/fileadmin/t/studabt/downloads/Studienplaene/Oktober_2017/BachelorstudiumTechnischeChemieE033290.pdf
5	Bachelor Pharmazie	033 305	University of Vienna	http://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Bachelorcurricula/BA_Pharmazie.pdf
6	Bachelor Molekulare Biologie	033 630	University of Vienna	https://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Bachelorcurricula/BA_Biologie_Version2015_Juni2018.pdf
7	Bachelor Ernährungswissenschaften	033 638	University of Vienna	https://nutrition.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/i_ernaehrung/Download/Bachelor/Curriculum/Curriculum_Bachelor_Ernaehrungswissenschaften_2013__geringfuegige_AEnderung__2017_2018_40.pdf
8	Bachelor Chemie	033 662	University of Vienna	http://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Bachelorcurricula/BA_Chemie.pdf
9	Bachelor Molekularbiologie (Graz)	033 665	University Graz	https://online.uni-graz.at/kfu_online/wbMitteilungsblaetter_neu.display?pNr=14602&pDocNr=3627868&pOrgNr=14190
________	____________________________________________________	____________________	__________________________	___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10	Master LMBT	066 418	BOKU	https://www.boku.ac.at/fileadmin/data/H01000/mitteilungsblatt/MB_2017_18/MB21/066_417_Mastercurriculum_LMWT_2018U.pdf
11	Master TU Vienna Biotechnology	066 490	TU	https://www.tuwien.ac.at/fileadmin/t/studabt/downloads/Studienplaene/Oktober_2018/MasterTechnischeChemie.pdf
12	Master Pharmazie	066 605	University of Vienna	http://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Masterstudien/MA_Pharmazie.pdf
13	Master Immunobiologie	066 830	University of Vienna	http://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Masterstudien/MA_Molekulare_Mikrobiologie_Mikrobielle_Oekologie_und_Immunbiologie.pdf
14	Master Biologische Chemie	066 863	University of Vienna	http://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Masterstudien/MA_BiologischeChemie.pdf
15	Master Bioinformatik	066 875	University of Vienna	http://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Masterstudien/MA_Bioinformatik.pdf
16	Master Genetik und Entwicklungsbiologie	066 877	University of Vienna	http://senat.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/s_senat/konsolidierte_Masterstudien/MA_GenetikEntwicklungsbiologie.pdf
________	____________________________________________________	____________________	__________________________	___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

BOKU stands short for "Universität für Bodenkultur" (Wien / Vienna).

TU stands short for "Technische Universität" (Wien / Vienna), aka the "Technical University" in Vienna.

Keep in mind that the above table currently only lists curricula organized in Austria. If anyone else wants to extend this table to include other european universities, such as in Germany, feel free to do so - but the dataset for these universities will have to be registered externally (or at the least maintained by someone else for these other european universities).

I am willing to add required code to the studium gem, in order to make available any external dataset (and thus add other universities), though. I just can not maintain the dataset itself, since it will require constant adjustments. (In theory we could obtain the dataset dynamically, via HTTP-queries and parsing of the result, but no code doing this in an automated manner is presently part of the studium gem itself.)

Note that the studium gem keeps these "Mitteilungsblätter" stored in the file called studium/yaml/mitteilungsblätter.yml.

Showing all lectures that belong to a particular curriculum

You can show all lectures that belong to a particular curriculum via:

studium --lectures-from-this-curriculum=geodäsie
studium --lectures-from-this-curriculum=217

This does not work perfectly well, so if in doubt use the curriculum id, as a number.

The very important file called lecture_information.yml

Since as of July 2022 the very important file called lecture_information.yml now resides at:

studium/lib/studium/lecture_information/lecture_information.yml

It seemed better to me to put it into a separate directory, considering it is just about the most important .yml file of this project.

Remember that the file caters primarily to universities in Austria, but since it is ultimately just one huge hash (see the content), you can simply add more .yml files to it, or modify the hash that you get to your liking - so the studium gem is, in principle extensible to accomodate datasets from different universities. I may even add more web-scraping means to allow users to automatically determine all lectures from a given curriculum at other universities - but for now (2022) this is not yet possible.

Determining the runmode of the Studium gem

The runmode can be determined via Studium.set_runmode().

Deprecations within the Studium gem

This subsection keeps track of some deprecations of this project.

The constant EXAM_TOPICS, which used to be:

EXAM_TOPICS = "#{Studium.project_base_directory?}exam_topics/"

as well as "aliases" to it, such as DIRECTORY_TO_THE_EXAM_TOPICS or EXAM_TOPICS_DIRECTORY, was deprecated as of July 2022.

If you want to obtain the exam-topics directory then you should consistently use the following method instead:

Studium.exam_topics_directory?

The old code will be published here for some time longer, but eventually it may be removed entirely:

  # ========================================================================= #
  # === EXAM_TOPICS
  #
  # This constant will store where the exam topics are stored on a
  # given computer system.
  #
  # The path will be relative to the PROJECT_BASE_DIRECTORY constant.
  #
  # Note that this is a constant though - it is recommended to use
  # the @exam_topics variable instead if you need the variable
  # to be dynamic.
  #
  # This may, for example, have a value such as:
  #
  #   /Programs/Ruby/2.5.1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.5.0/studium/exam_topics/
  #
  # ========================================================================= #
  EXAM_TOPICS = "#{Studium.project_base_directory?}exam_topics/"
    # ======================================================================= #
    # === DIRECTORY_TO_THE_EXAM_TOPICS
    # ======================================================================= #
    DIRECTORY_TO_THE_EXAM_TOPICS = EXAM_TOPICS
    # ======================================================================= #
    # === EXAM_TOPICS_DIRECTORY
    #
    # Same as above.
    # ======================================================================= #
    EXAM_TOPICS_DIRECTORY = EXAM_TOPICS

In July 2022 the old method called Studium.ensure_main_encoding() was deprecated. It did no longer seem necessary to have it, as UTF-8 is used by default now.

However had, perhaps in the future this may have to be re-enabled in one way or another. I will keep the code here, but it may also be that this code will never be re-added, in which case a future release of the studium gem may remove the following subsection. Either way here goes:

# ========================================================================= #
# === Studium.ensure_main_encoding
#
# This method will try to ensure the main encoding in use. This
# presently works for both Arrays and Strings; other classes are
# not supported (but they are also not as important as Arrays
# and Strings really; possibly excluding class Hash).
# ========================================================================= #
def self.ensure_main_encoding(i)
  copy = i
  use_this_encoding = @use_this_encoding
  # ======================================================================= #
  # === Handle Array next
  # ======================================================================= #
  if copy.is_a? Array
    copy = copy.map {|entry|
      if entry.is_a? String
        unless entry.encoding.to_s.include? use_this_encoding
          entry = entry.force_encoding(use_this_encoding)
        end
      end
      entry
    }
  # ======================================================================= #
  # === Handle Hash next
  # ======================================================================= #
  elsif copy.is_a? Hash
    new_hash = {}
    copy.each_pair {|key, value|
      unless key.encoding.to_s.include? use_this_encoding
        key = key.dup if key.frozen?
        unless key.is_a? Symbol
          key = key.force_encoding(use_this_encoding)
        end
      end
      if value.is_a? Array
        array = Studium.ensure_main_encoding(array)
      end
      new_hash[key] = ensure_main_encoding(value)
    }
    copy = new_hash
  # ======================================================================= #
  # === Handle String next
  # ======================================================================= #
  elsif copy.is_a? String
    unless copy.encoding.to_s.include? use_this_encoding
      copy = copy.dup if copy.frozen?
      copy = copy.force_encoding(use_this_encoding)
    end
  end
  return copy
end

In July 2022 the constant:

FILE_LECTURE_INFORMATION = "#{PROJECT_YAML_DIRECTORY}lecture_information.yml"

was deprecated. Use the toplevel instance variable @file_lecture_information instead, or the method Studium.file_lecture_information. The constant FILE_LECTURE_ALIASES was also deprecated in July 2022, as well as the constant FILE_CURRICULA.

The same counts for the constant FILE_IMPORTANT_EXAMS. In general, methods are now more important, so use the replacement method called Studium.file_important_exams.

The constant:

ALPHABET = ('a'..'z').to_a

was moved into the only .rb file that needs it - it was part of constants.rb before July 2022.

The following constant was removed in July 2022:

# ========================================================================= #
# === FILE_UPCOMING_PRACTICAL_COURSES
#
# This file is for a .yml file that keeps track of upcoming practical
# courses. In particular, this may be helpful in order to determine
# which practical courses may overlap with one another.
# ========================================================================= #
# FILE_UPCOMING_PRACTICAL_COURSES =
#   "#{STUDIUM_YAML_DIR}WS2017/upcoming_practical_courses.yml"

It is probably no longer needed, because the file lecture_information.yml can indicate in which practical courses we are registered now.

The constant ARRAY_TITLE_OF_THE_INDIVIDUAL_CURRICULA was also disabled as of July 2022 - each individual curricula now has the title on its very second line:

# ========================================================================= #
# === ARRAY_TITLE_OF_THE_INDIVIDUAL_CURRICULA
#
# This constant is mostly on an ad-hoc basis in that we will register
# the title of all individual curricula. This can then be used by
# Studium::DetermineCurricula in particular to determine which
# courses ought to be shown.
# ========================================================================= #
ARRAY_TITLE_OF_THE_INDIVIDUAL_CURRICULA = [
  'Bachelorcurriculum Informatik und molekulare Biologie',
  'Bachelorcurriculum (Bio)Informatik und molekulare Biotechnologie, unter Berücksichtigung medizinisch-immunologischer Aspekte',
  'Bachelorcurriculum Vector-based strategies in Life Sciences, Molecular Medicine and Biotechnology'
]

The constant PASSED_EXAMS_PER_MONTH:

PASSED_EXAMS_PER_MONTH = Studium.file_passed_exams_per_month
# Before March 2024, the constant FILE_PASSED_EXAMS_PER_MONTH was still in use. It
# has since then been deprecated, though; use the method called
# Studium.file_passed_exams_per_month() instead.

Was just an alias in the past. It has been removed in July 2022.

If you have to, use the method Studium.file_passed_exams_per_month. The constant called FILE_DIRECTORY_TO_THE_EXAM_TOPICS was also removed.

The constant DIRECTORY_EXAM_TOPICS was removed as well.

# ========================================================================= #
# === DIRECTORY_EXAM_TOPICS
#
# Determine where we can find the exam topics, as constant.
# ========================================================================= #
DIRECTORY_EXAM_TOPICS = MY_EXAM_TOPICS

Vorbesprechungen / Preparatory meetings

Some courses require a date before the actual course week, which we will call "preliminary meetings" (in german, "Vorbesprechung" or "Vorbesprechungstermin"). In July 2022 the name was changed to preparatory_meeting.

The Studium project supports this keeping track of such a preparatory meeting. The corresponding entry that has to exist, in the file lecture_information.yml, is called "preparatory_meeting:". An example for such an entry follows (you could copy/paste it if you need it for your own dataset that way):

!ruby/symbol preparatory_meeting:
- "Dienstag 09.10.2021, 16:30-17:30, Ort: BZB/Seminarraum 3, 6.Ebene 6.507, Dr.-Bohr-Gasse 9, 1030 Wien"

The class PreparatoryMeeting can then show upcoming preliminary meetings, provided that they were registered in that .yml file. That way you should not miss the mandatory attendance part anymore of some courses, as you can automatically keep track of this, thanks to classes such as PreparatoryMeeting.

The name Vorbesprechungen is kept as a backwards "alias" to this new class.

If you wish to designate this in the file lecture_information.yml then you can use something like the following, adapted to your use case:

!ruby/symbol preparatory_meeting:
 - "05.10.2023, 09:15-10:15, Ort: An der BOKU, Muthgasse 7"

Returning the dataset of a specific exam topic

If you have a need to return the dataset of a specific exam topic, as an Array, then you can use the following API:

array = Studium.return_dataset_for_this_exam_topic('geology')
array = Studium.return_dataset_for_this_exam_topic('genetics')

And so forth. This method appeared to be useful to use it on some website, for instance.

Displaying curriculum modules on the commandline

class Studium::Curricula::Modules::DisplayOnTheCommandline can display each module of a specific curriculum on the commandline.

This only really works very well for individual curricula. But in principle this class could be extended to work with all curricula in general.

class Studium::ReturnNEctsFromThisUrl

class Studium::ReturnNEctsFromThisUrl can be used to determine the number of ECTS points of a given lecture.

Pass the remote URL to this class in order for this to work.

Example:

Studium::ReturnNEctsFromThisUrl.new('https://online.boku.ac.at/BOKUonline/wbLv.wbShowLVDetail?pStpSpNr=278600')

Java code pertaining to the studium gem

Since about two years, give or take, say starting in the year 2020, Java code has been added to the studium gem - both for the commandline, as well as GUIs. This is highly experimental still and not very extensive.

Most work goes into AskExamQuestion.java right now, until it is possible to work with the Studium gem from the commandline, in particular on Windows. Then when this works alright, we may extend the Swing and JavaFX bindings, to make it more convenient to work with the project via a GUI - but first the commandline has to work very well.

Once that works ok-ish the studium gem should be more useful on windows too; Java works fairly well on windows and is quite fast. Speed is one of the few things Java is better than ruby. In the long run, though, it may be ideal to use truffleruby or jruby to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Stay tuned for more to come in this regard.

Generating .pdf files

You can generate some .pdf files about exam-topics.

For example, for the topic amg, you can generate a .pdf file through:

studium --generate-pdf-for=amg1

Do note that this functionality depends on the gem called prawn.

Here are more examples for pdf-generation:

studium --generate-pdf-for=biotech1
studium --generate-pdf-for=biotech2
studium --generate-pdf-for=virus1
studium --generate-pdf-for=virus2

Note that most of the functionality related to PDF-files can be found under the directory studium/utility_scripts/pdf/.

Since as of August 2022 it is now possible to generate a huge .pdf file that contains ALL the exam questions. So this is using the same functionality as above, but it will integrate all topics. Beware, this will lead to a truly huge .pdf file:

The commandline for this functionality can be invoked by issuing any of the following:

studium --mega-pdf
studium --monster-pdf
studium --monster

Note that this may take about 30 seconds or longer, and the generated .pdf file will easily have more than 1449 pages. So this is not too terribly useful for most people, but just in case this functionality exists, so there you go.

class Studium::BlockedCourses

A blocked course is something like a practical lab-course that occupies a week or two weeks, en-bloc in one go. Such a course requires mandatory presence (that is the student has to be there), and is spanning over a limited time - less than the whole semester (half-year).

The reason why this class was written in October 2022 was to be able to indicate which courses are blocked. Perhaps you may want to register only for some blocked course, so in this case that class may be useful.

Note that you have to populate the lecture with the correct "lva_dates:" entries by yourself. Perhaps in the future this may be changed to automatically determine the LVA-dates, but for now this has to be done manually.

class Studium::DisplayLectureUrl

This class can display lectures and their associated remote URL (the homepage) via the commandline.

Basic usage example from within Ruby:

require 'studium/utility_scripts/display_lecture_url.rb'
Studium::DisplayLectureUrl.new(ARGV)
Studium::DisplayLectureUrl.new('--indi2')

This class can either output just one lecture's course URL, or operate in a batch-mode where all lectures of a curriculum are displayed.

Studium::DisplayLectureUrl.new('
  301586 Molekulare Medizin 2:
  301585 Molekulare Medizin 1:
  301407 DNA-Tumorviren, vom Krebsauslöser zum Therapeutikum:
  301589 Literaturseminar Molekulare Medizin:
  322052 Nukleinsäure-Therapeutika: Antisense, RNA Interferenz, CRISPR - M14:
  301586 Translation und Translationskontrolle bei Eukaryonten II:
  322083 Zelluläre und molekulare Pharmakologie und molekulare Medizin - M14:
')

The latter functionality was added to simplify working with "raw" data, e. g. if you have this listed in a .md text file and want to copy/paste it. See also the executable at bin/display_lecture_url.

class Studium::UniversityCourse

class Studium::UniversityCourse was added to represent a university-course, in December 2022. It remains to be seen how useful this class will be.

I needed such a class because I wanted to determine the next exams or the next exam via:

.next_exams? # Obtain all upcoming exams, as Array. .next_exam? # Obtain the next upcoming exam, as String. nil otherwise.

It is not difficult to obtain the list of upcoming exams without such a class, but I found it was easier to read, so I added this class.

Studium.map_input_to_this_curriculum_filename

In December 2022 the method Studium.map_input_to_this_curriculum_filename() was added.

The reason as to why this method was added was because the studium gem used many different ways, in different files, to determine which input is valid (that is, can be mapped to a locally existing file containing a curriculum) and which input is not.

For instance, a given input such as genetik or genetic should be mapped to the following target file:

studium/yaml/curricula/bachelor/bachelor_biologie_mikrobiologie_und_genetik_033630.yml

But, internally, there were methods and case/when menus that would work on :genetik (as a symbol), and some others that would assume 'genetik' - but then omit the alternative aliases, such as genetic, and other aliased names. So it was a very big mess really.

Since as of December, with that now documented method, all parts of the Studium gem that require such a mapping, should make use of that method instead. Internally the method will convert all input to a String - it seems easier to work with Strings here.

Right now not all the code used in the Studium gem will make use of the method here, but one reason why this method is documented is so that I can eventually transition all code parts to this new method over time. So at some point in the future this will become the new default.

A related method, called Studium.return_file_for_this_curriculum() exists, but this method may eventually be deprecated, or rather, assimilated into the new method. Right now it still exists, though.

class Studium::ParseRemoteLecture

In December 2022 it was decided that class Studium::ParseRemoteLecture will be improved and extended in the near future.

Up until December 2022 I mostly added courses manually into the big .yml file (lecture_information.yml). However had, that is quite cumbersome and takes away a lot of time. Furthermore this also leads to more errors, so I really needed a way to parse a remote homepage, and turn this information into a correct, sanitized yaml-format. That way I can also assemble whole curricula offered at different universities, so different people could extend the dataset. Perhaps one day we could include all curricula at every university in europe, or even world-wide. But the latter may be for other people - I only want to focus on a dataset that focuses on central europe, while giving other users the option to extend and maintain their own datasets here.

Note that right now class Studium::ParseRemoteLecture isn't quite as solid and useful yet - it still has to be improved.

class Studium::Exams::UpcomingRegisteredExams

class Studium::Exams::UpcomingRegisteredExams can be used to quickly show all exams you registered for. In order for this to work you need to have added the entry registered: in the file lecture_information.yml.

Grades

Exams at universities are typically graded. Different countries make use of different systems. For example, germany uses 6 grades whereas Austria uses 5 grades.

If you want to output which exams fit to a certain grade, such as grade 2, then you can use code written in studium/toplevel_methods/show_passed_exams_having_this_grade.rb:

The API is:

Studium.show_passed_exams_having_this_grade
Studium.show_passed_exams_having_this_grade(2)
Studium.show_passed_exams_having_this_grade(3)
Studium.show_passed_exams_having_this_grade(4)

Simply pass the number to that method, corresponding to the grade that is sought. In order for this to work, you must use some file where the grades are stored. This can be either in the file lecture_information.yml (I recommend this approach), but it could also be a local .csv file. (The latter is mostly still there for legacy reasons; when this project was started, a .csv file was used rather than a .yml file. Lateron it was realized that the yaml file would be much better, since it can also include native and nested data structures, which makes it a lot easier to parse as-is, via the yaml wrapper that ruby has.)

If you want to display the average grades of passed exams then you can use class Studium::Exams::AverageGrade.

Checks and sanitizing information stored in the studium gem

The studium gem contains a LOT of information - the biggest data-file is the file called lecture_information.yml. But this is not the only file that contains information - there are various other YAML files (mostly) that contains important information as well. Furthermore, the studium gem depends on information made available on the world wide web, that is, on other computers.

Naturally when a project depends on a lot of information, errors may exist or show up over time. Sometimes old classes are removed or changed, and then we should still ensure that the existing functionality remains in a working state. The whole projects should remain in a working state, anyway.

Thus, in order to cope with this situation, and reduce the number of errors and problems that the studium gem faces, various helper-scripts are available that should help the user, but also developers (including myself) with the project. We want to verify that the information we use is correct.

This is done primarily by the .rb files stored in the studium/check_and_sanitize/ subdirectory of this project.

For instance, say that you wish to check for problems in the file lecture_information.yml. This can be done as follows from the commandline:

studium --check-file-information

class Studium::Exams::UpcomingExamsDataset

The class Studium::Exams::UpcomingExamsDataset is a helper-class.

It wraps over the file exams.yml and allows a simple query to the upcoming exams, based on that file (which, as exam, must be registered in the file exams.yml).

This information can then be used to query which exams are upcoming on which day, at which time. This information can also be re-used in different classes, which was one important reason as to why this class has been created in the first place.

Take note that by default this file is not distributed via the studium gem, as it is only useful for my own use case. Other users may have to create their own exams.yml files. The format is simple - first comes the date of the exam at hand, then the description, such as:

26.01.2012: "TU Wien, 185.AAA java course 101, 18:30-20:00"

Showing upcoming exams (exams that will be held in the future, from today)

class Studium::ShowUpcomingExams.new can show upcoming exams, on the commandline.

The first input argument should be a number, e. g. 10, which means that the first 10 upcoming exams will be shown. For the next 20 exams, it would be d20.

Note that this depends on aliases called "pwdstud1" or "pwdstud2". These have to exist in a yaml file (on my system this is the yaml file named cd_aliases.yml). The display is on the commandline but in principle, a GUI could be used as well for this task.

Do note that when this class is invoked, it will additionally store the result into a file called, e. g. d20.md or d10.md. This would allow you to upload that file if you want to. I needed that functionality because I wanted to display the upcoming exams somewhere else other than on my machine, for when I am not at home.

Note that there does exist another class, which can show upcoming exams, via a .html file. This class is called Studium::Exams::UpcomingImportantExams.

You can invoke class Studium::Exams::UpcomingImportantExams from the commandline by issuing something like the following:

studium --upcoming-exams

The display will be a HTML table essentially. In order for this to work, the file lecture_information.yml must contain the information for these upcoming exams - it is the only file that you may have to update, though. (In theory code could be added to automatically check for new exams, but this requires more code to be written. I am not sure if I will add this, simply due to time constraints alone.)

You can pass in some other commands to the file from the commandline, such as --do-not-exit - see the --help option for more information pertaining to class Studium::Exams::UpcomingImportantExams.

If you want an Array of upcoming exams, consider using the following method:

Studium::Exams::UpcomingExams.in_this_curriculum()
Studium::Exams::UpcomingExams.in_this_curriculum(:bachelor_agrarwissenschaften)

Remember that this will only work if lecture_information.yml contains that information, so always maintain this .yml file properly.

The yaml file array_allowed_entries_for_the_file_lecture_information.yml

The yaml file array_allowed_entries_for_the_file_lecture_information.yml contains all entries that are allowed in the file lecture_information.yml.

A few entries will be explained next.

Let's start with the entry !ruby/symbol course_registration_time_limit which was added in February 2023.

This entry simply specifies at which point one can register for the given course. This is especially important for courses that have a specific time limitation.

Usage example:

!ruby/symbol course_registration_time_limit:
- 01.02.2023-23.02.2023

A middle '-' is mandatory here. First entry is the starting day; second entry (after the '-') is the end day, that is the very last day that can be used for course registration still.

Note that this entry is experimental as of February 2023 - at a later time it will be determined how useful this entry is. But I think it is sufficiently useful to keep it available.

class Studium::ShowAllUnfinishedCoursesOfThisCurriculum

class Studium::ShowAllUnfinishedCoursesOfThisCurriculum will show all unfinished courses belonging to a particular curriculum at hand.

Invocation examples I tend to use from the commandline:

show-all-unfinished-courses-of-this-curriculum master-biotech
show-all-unfinished-courses-of-this-curriculum master-molbio

Studium::Exams.report_nquestions_of

The method Studium::Exams.report_nquestions_of() can be used to quickly report how many exam questions are available in a particular exam topic. If you pass in an Array of exam-topics, such as 'bem1', 'bem2', 'metabolism', then the method will report the total amount of exam-questions in all these exam topics combined. I use this to query "meta"-topics combined, such as biochemistry1, biochemistry2, and so forth.

class Studium::NExamsInTheseTopics

class Studium::NExamsInTheseTopics can report how many exam topics are registered in the given input-topics at hand, and how many of these were solved.

Several topics are combined together.

For example, for basic biochemistry, you can pass the argument meta_biochemistry to this class, as a String.

class Studium::NExamsInTheseTopics will then output how many questions were registered in that topic in total, and how many of these questions were already solved.

For the "meta-topic" meta_biochemistry, we group together many biochemistry-related topics - basic biochemistry, advanced biochemistry, structural biology, proteomics, metabolism, enzymes, glycolysis and so forth.

I created this class so that I can have a look at combined topics. Otherwise it is quite similar to the statistics shown when a single question is asked on the commandline, through class AskExamQuestion (full name is: Studium::Exams::AskExamQuestion).

Since as of August 2018, you can also use this as exam-trainer, by providing the number of the sub-topic at hand.

So for example, if the main topic is meta-genetics, and you pass in the argument 3, then the entry at the 3rd place will be used as means to ask a question.

Examples:

metagen 2
metagen 5

Where "metagen" is my alias to:

n_exams_in_this_topic meta_genetics

By default, lines that end via "[]" are ignored, but you can also ask a question from ALL available questions, even if they end with a "[]" token.

Commandline example:

ask_exam_questions amg1 --all-questions

This would ask a random question from the amg1-dataset.

class Studium::Exams::ExamBubble

class Studium::Exams::ExamBubble was added in May 2023. The primary use case for this class is to allow the user to train a specific exam topic.

For instance, say that you wish to prepare for a chemistry-related upcoming exam. You are somewhat tired of invoking the class that handles exam questions manually - after all you do a lots of repetitive calls on the commandline on a per-question asked, so a more efficient way would seem better: a looped variant, one where you can continually train your knowledge for, say, a topic such as all about chemistry that is continually asked.

The API for this is somewhat flexible:

Studium::Exams::ExamBubble.for(:chemistry)
Studium::Exams::ExamBubble.for(:genetics)
Studium::Exams::ExamBubble.for('biotechnology')

This would start the interactive loop, where the exam topic is set to all of chemistry. This is actually the exam meta topic; it is also possible to set individual exam topics without using an exam meta topic. More on this at a later point in this subsection.

The general idea behind class Studium::Exams::ExamBubble is to enable the user to study different exam-topics concomitantly. I used this in KDE konsole, on a per-individual tab basis: so tab number #5 would be a trainer for chemistry, tab number #6 would be a trainer for informatics, and so on. That way the user can prepare for multiple upcoming exams using different tabs in the KDE konsole - which was actually the primary motivation for writing this class in May 2023.

If you have a need to set an exam-meta topic from the outside, you can use the method set_exam_meta_topic_to_use such as in:

exam_bubble = Studium::Exams::ExamBubble.new
exam_bubble.set_exam_meta_topic_to_use :chemistry
exam_bubble.set_exam_meta_topic_to_use :informatics

And so forth.

Keep in mind that in order for this functionality to work, the exam meta topic must have been registered. See elsewhere in this document how to set up new exam meta topics.

What will be the effect of assigning the exam meta topic chemistry?

This means that, once in the interactive part of class Studium::Exams::ExamBubble, the class will continually ask exam questions from ALL exam topics that are part of the exam meta topics. So, in chemistry, we'd ask questions from basic chemistry, advanced chemistry, organic chemistry and so forth - all that are defined to be part of the exam meta topic.

The default behaviour is to consider each subquestion to have the same likelihood of an exam question that is to be asked. So if there are five exam topics, then there is a 20% chance to ask an exam question from any of these five topics. If an exam topic was already answered completely then this is disregarded, so the remaining four (in this example) would have a chance of 25% each. And so on.

If you are in the interactive part of class Studium::Exams::ExamBubble you can always get help via:

help --help # this one works as well, for direct commandline use mostly.

Note that we can call class ExamBubble also "the perpetual exam-question asker" and use it to ask ALL remaining exam questions. This functionality has not yet been fully added in May 2023, but in the future we may extend this. That way the studium gem could be used to really achieve a 100% exam-questions answered status, for ALL the available exam-questions registered in the project.

Please take note that presently (May 2023) the class will only work for exam-meta-topics, not individual topics (such as "basic chemistry"). This restriciton may be dropped in the future, but for now I want to emphasise that this class is really only used for a meta-exam topic, not for simple exam topics; for simple exam topics use a class such as AskExamQuestion or something similar.

The web-version of the studium gem

Right now there are only few web-widgets available.

One is:

studium/www/next_generation_exam_question_trainer/next_generation_exam_question_trainer.cgi

I tested this, and it finally works, since as of June 2023.

I can now study the whole exam set through that page, and solved.cgi. This is not extremely pretty or sophisticated for now - at a later time I plan to improve this.

Right now in June 2023 it looks like this:

So, quite simple right now.

Obtaining the curricula from a remote website

class Studium::CurriculaFromThisWebsite (added in July 2023) can be used to obtain all curricula for a given university course.

On the commandline I use something like this:

curriculafromthiswebsite https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/course.html?lv=301605&semester=2023W

The output may then be as follows:

Studium::CurriculaFromThisWebsite: The remote website at 
Studium::CurriculaFromThisWebsite: https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/course.html?lv=301605&semester=2023W
Studium::CurriculaFromThisWebsite: contains the following curricula IDs:

  066877
  066877
  066834
  066834
  066865

This class was primarily added because I needed a way to automatically determine all curricula for a given course. At a later time I intend to expand on this and offer a fully automatic way to verify that a given individual curriculum is valid.

class Studium::Courses

class Studium::Courses, added in July 2023, and residing at studium/utility_scripts/courses/courses.rb, will handle all courses registered in the file lecture_information.yml.

The class was added because I needed to query certain things from the commandline, and other classes weren't as appropriate, so a new class had to be added.

The class will eventually allow for many commandline-options, and be useful in answering questions such as:

"At university xyz, for the winter semester, show all courses that require continous, mandatory presence in a blocked variant."

(Blocked variant means, for instance, two weeks of practical lab work. The schedule for that course is blocked.)

Studium.exam_topic_number?

Studium.exam_topic_number? is a helper method, in combination with the roebe gem. I can use it to quickly show the top-ten exam topics. So if I'd pass:

Studium.exam_topic_number?(1)

it would return the first exam topic in use.

This is used in the exam-question widget for ruby-gtk3, when no argument is passed, for instance. This was precisely the primary use case as to why this method was added in October 2023.

class Studium::Exams::NotCompleted

class Studium::Exams::NotCompleted can be used to show which exams have not yet been completed successfully. In other words: this class will show exams that you can (or should) still participate in.

Mind you - this requires that the information is noted down in the file called lecture_information.yml, so you first need to make sure this file contains all the required information.

Invocation example:

Studium::Exams::NotCompleted.new(:bachelor_genetics)

class Studium::Exams::ShowUpcomingExams

The fairly useful class ShowUpcomingExams will display the next n upcoming exams, where n should be a number from 3-20 ideally, simply as that is more convenient to digest and read on the commandline.

The studium gem also contains some files that are executables, powered by class Studium::Exams::ShowUpcomingExams. These files are called d10, d20 or d100, respectively, and can be found in the bin/ subdirectory of this gem.

d10 defaults to showing the next 10 upcoming exams; d20 defaults to showing the next 20 upcoming exams, d100 for the next upcoming 100 exams, and so forth. Typically users will only need d10 or d20 - it is rare to prepare for 100 upcoming exams, so d100 is usually used whenever the user wants to just see all upcoming exams. Personally I never needed a very high number, but I used it mostly to showcase which exams could come up, and so I could prepare and plan ahead for them in advanced; the 100 here mostly stands, sort of, for "show me all upcoming exams next".

Don't forget to keep the "register:" entry in the lecture_information.yml file, to indicate which exams are upcoming. In the past a separate file called exams.yml was used, but since several years this information is all unified and presented solely via the file called lecture_information.yml.

If you want to designate another file or location, have a look at the file file_constants.rb. You can also invoke this method to set another file position:

Studium.set_file_exams()

Simply pass the location of your exams-file, which must be a yaml file, into that method. It is, however had, simpler to just modify lecture_information.yml.

If you simply need the dataset of upcoming exams, you can use the following API to achieve this functionality, and obtain the Array containing the names of all upcoming exams:

require 'studium'
dataset = Studium::ShowUpcomingExams.return_all_registered_upcoming_exams # An array wil be returned here.

This is how it looks like, in May 2023 after a partial rewrite:

In January 2024 the old reporting-code of this class was changed a bit. I think it now looks slightly better, as can be seen on the following image:

I believe the changes were an improvement. The class will now also show outdated exam registrations, while indicating that these are outdated via a leading emoji "icon". The reason why this was done was to nudge the user - aka me, primarily - to update outdated data in the file lecture_information.yml. This may be annoying in the short run, but in the long run I found it is much better to have an up-to-date dataset.

The rationale and use case for the toplevel method Studium.add_this_line_to_that_exam_topic

In January 2024, the following toplevel method was added:

Studium.add_this_line_to_that_exam_topic

This method can be used to add an exam-question line to a specific exam-topic, such as "genetics".

This method was added because I realiased that, on windows, I need a GUI to handle all these things. On Linux I can do it via the commandline, but on windows this is too annoying, so a GUI (probably jruby-SWING) has to be used instead. That method thus facilitates an extension to the GUI at a later time.

class Studium::ParseLvaDates

This class (class Studium::ParseLvaDates) can be used to sanitize lecture data, for lva dates, aka when a lecture is occurring. This only works for a few universities right now; perhaps it will be improved in the future.

class Studium::AutopurgeThisLectureDate

class Studium::AutopurgeThisLectureDate can be used to eliminate individual, outdated LVA dates from the file lecture_information.yml

This works ok-ish, but is not perfect. For instance, exams: entries and lva_dates entries will be kept, so you may end up with such entries, without them having any single entry defined (because the only entry was removed by Studium::AutopurgeThisLectureDate already). So use this with care - it is not a perfect class; it only has a limited, but nonetheless still useful, use case.

class Studium::DateSanitizer

class Studium::DateSanitizer has been added to the studium gem in March 2024. The idea behind this class is that it can take a String, as input, that is assumed to hold a proper lva-date (especially exam-related dates). It will then return the sanitized version.

For convenience reasons, but also due to legacy reasons, the class defines a few toplevel methods such as:

Studium.date_sanitizer
Studium.date_sanitize
Studium.parse_this_lva_date

Contact information and mandatory 2FA (no longer) coming up in 2022 / 2023

If your creative mind has ideas and specific suggestions to make this gem more useful in general, feel free to drop me an email at any time, via:

shevy@inbox.lt

Before that email I used an email account at Google gmail, but in 2021 I decided to slowly abandon gmail, for various reasons. In order to limit the explanation here, allow me to just briefly state that I do not feel as if I want to promote any Google service anymore when the user becomes the end product (such as via data collection by upstream services, including other proxy-services). My feeling is that this is a hugely flawed business model to begin with, and I no longer wish to support this in any way, even if only indirectly so, such as by using services of companies that try to promote this flawed model.

In regards to responding to emails: please keep in mind that responding may take some time, depending on the amount of work I may have at that moment. So it is not that emails are ignored; it is more that I have not (yet) found the time to read and reply. This means there may be a delay of days, weeks and in some instances also months. There is, unfortunately, not much I can do when I need to prioritise my time investment, but I try to consider all feedback as an opportunity to improve my projects nonetheless.

In 2022 rubygems.org decided to make 2FA mandatory for every gem owner eventually:

see https://blog.rubygems.org/2022/06/13/making-packages-more-secure.html

However had, that has been reverted again, so I decided to shorten this paragraph. Mandatory 2FA may exclude users who do not have a smartphone device or other means to 'identify'. I do not feel it is a fair assumption by others to be made that non-identified people may not contribute code, which is why I reject it. Mandatory 2FA would mean an end to all my projects on rubygems.org, so let's hope it will never happen. (Keep in mind that I refer to mandatory 2FA; I have no qualms for people who use 2FA on their own, but this carrot-and-stick strategy by those who control the rubygems infrastructure is a very bad one to pursue.