RICCourseList

A full-stack course management and lookup system built for RIC.

RICCourseList provides a web interface for browsing courses and students, searching and sorting course information, viewing course attendees, and managing favorite courses.

Features

• 📚 Course List

  • Browse all available courses
  • Search by course code or name
  • Case-sensitive / case-insensitive search
  • Search by course code only
  • Sort courses by code
  • Pagination

• 👨‍🎓 Student List

  • Browse students
  • Search and view student information
  • View courses associated with a student

• 👥 Course Attendees

  • View students enrolled in a selected course
  • Navigate between courses and their attendees

Tech Stack

Frontend

• React
• TypeScript
• Vite

Backend

• Go
• Gin
• pgx
• PostgreSQL

Development

• VS Code
• Git / GitHub
• Replit
• ChatGPT

Architecture

RICCourseList follows a simple full-stack architecture:

┌──────────────────────┐
│      React / TS      │
│       Frontend       │
└──────────┬───────────┘
           │ HTTP / JSON
           ▼
┌──────────────────────┐
│      Go + Gin        │
│        API           │
└──────────┬───────────┘
           │ SQL
           ▼
┌──────────────────────┐
│      PostgreSQL      │
│       Database       │
└──────────────────────┘

The frontend communicates with the backend through REST APIs. The backend handles request validation, query construction, pagination, and database access.

Database

The current database uses PostgreSQL.

Main entities include:

students
    │
    │ many-to-many
    ▼
student_courses
    ▲
    │ many-to-many
    │
courses

The student_courses table represents the relationship between students and courses.

Primary keys and foreign-key constraints are used to maintain data integrity.

API

The backend provides RESTful APIs under the /api prefix.

All list endpoints support pagination through:

• current — current page number
• page_size — number of items per page
• ascending — whether the results are sorted in ascending order

Successful responses follow the general structure:

{
  "meta": {
    "total_count": 0,
    "number_of_pages": 0
  },
  "body": []
}

Courses

GET /api/courses

Query parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
search	string	Search keyword
current	integer	Current page number
page_size	integer	Number of courses per page
case_sensitive	boolean	Whether the search is case-sensitive
code_only	boolean	Search only within course codes
ascending	boolean	Sort courses in ascending or descending order

Example:

GET /api/courses?search=COMP&current=1&page_size=10&case_sensitive=false&code_only=false&ascending=true

Students

GET /api/students

Query parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
name	string	Search keyword for student names
current	integer	Current page number
page_size	integer	Number of students per page
ascending	boolean	Sort students in ascending or descending order

Example:

GET /api/students?name=Jason&current=1&page_size=10&ascending=true

Course Attendees

GET /api/courses/:id/attendees

Returns the students enrolled in a specific course.

Path parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
id	integer	Course ID

Query parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
current	integer	Current page number
page_size	integer	Number of students per page
ascending	boolean	Sort students in ascending or descending order

Example:

GET /api/courses/1/attendees?current=1&page_size=10&ascending=true

Student Attended Classes

GET /api/students/:id/attended_classes

Returns the courses attended by a specific student.

Path parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
id	integer	Student ID

Query parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
current	integer	Current page number
page_size	integer	Number of courses per page
ascending	boolean	Sort courses in ascending or descending order

Example:

GET /api/students/1/attended_classes?current=1&page_size=10&ascending=true

Error Responses

Invalid request parameters return HTTP 400 Bad Request with an error message.

Example:

{
  "error": "Invalid course ID"
}

Internal database errors return HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.

{
  "error": "..."
}

Query Validation

The backend validates and sanitizes query parameters before constructing SQL queries.

For example:

• Page numbers must be positive.
• Page sizes are restricted to a reasonable range.
• Search strings are length-limited.
• %, _, and \ are escaped when used in SQL LIKE queries.
• Sorting fields and ordering are explicitly controlled.
• Pagination uses SQL LIMIT and OFFSET.

This prevents malformed requests from reaching the database and avoids treating user-provided search characters as unintended SQL pattern operators.

Author

Guo Zichen (Jason)

GitHub: @JasonG25