Workshop Lifecycle Tool

This is the workshop lifecycle tool created by HIFIS. It builds upon a workflow centered around the Indico event management tool.

General Information

License

This tool is published under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.

Intended Audience

HIFIS instructors or anyone who organizes workshops with Indico and could use some automation to support one or multiple encompassing steps.

How it works

The Workshop Lifecycle Tool stores its workshop information in a dedicated directory (~/workshops by default). Inside, each workshop has its own directory, named after the numeric ID that the workshop has in the Indico system. These directories store all information related to the respective workshops.

Further, a templates subdirectory stores the various presets the tool uses, like Email-templates, XeLaTeX-templates for the certificates etc.

On creation of a workshop these templates will be copied into the workshop directory, so they can be adapted on a per-workshop basis.

How to set up and Configure the Tool

Inside the workshop directory the configuration for the tool resides in the file wolito-config.yml. This files controls the settings for the application.

To set up the application:

1. Create the ~/workshops directory if it does not yet exist.
2. Copy the resources/wolito-config.yml from this project to create the starting configuration ~/workshops/wolito-config.yml.
3. Adapt ~/workshops/wolito-config.yml to your needs and setup.

Note that you will need an Indico Oauth-Token and API-Key that identifies you with the Indico system you are using. These can be generated in your Indico user settings and allow the tool to access the events in the same function as you can access them as the user.

How to Use

The main command is hifis-wolito. It is to be followed by one of the subcommands specified below to execute a step in the workshop management workflow.

The tool is split into several subcommands which will be explained in detail below.

Syntax:

hifis-wolito [-v] <subcommand>

Currently available subcommands are

• fetch
• certificates

The Indico ID

Most subcommands operate using the <indico id> of a workshop. This ID is a number given by indico to identify an event. It can be obtained by looking at the URL of an event.

Example:

If the URL of an event is https://indico.example.org/event/123/, then the Indico ID of that event would be 123.

All subcommands support the --help option to give additional information on their arguments and how to use them.

Debug Settings

The -v option can be repeated up to 4 times to increase the verbosity setting. A higher verbosity will prompt the tool to give a more detailed output on its current operations.

The fetch Subcommand

Syntax:

hifis-wolito fetch <indico id>

This command will look up the Indico server (configured in settings.py) for the event with the given ID. If the event is found, the participant and contribution data for that event will be stored in the workshop directory.

Note: Currently all previously existing workshop information will be replaced.

The certificates Subcommand

Syntax:

hifis-wolito certificates [-deEgG] <indico id>

This command manages the participation certificates. If none of the additional options is given, only a list of participants, their check-in state, generated certificates and whether these have been sent already will be given.

Options in lower-case will only appliy to participants whom have not been processed already, while upper-case options will be applied to all participants.

Certificate Generation

The -g and -G options will trigger the generation of the certificates.

Note: Only participants that are marked as checked in within Indico will receive certificates in any case.

For each participant in the selected scope (-g: only those without certificates, -G: all participants) the certificate template from the workshop will be filled in with the participant data and converted to a PDF file with XeLaTeX. The then generated certificates will then be signed according to the configuration in the signature.yml file.

Note: If the key file used for the signature requires a password, it will be prompted during the execution of this step.

The generated and signed certificates will be stored in the certificates subdirectory.

Certification Rules

The tool will automatically check for which contributions a participant can be certified.

1. A participant that is not checked-in in Indico can never be certified.
2. Contributions that are not within a session are considered to use the default session and will not be included in the certificate.
3. If a participant has no tags, they get certified for all sessions except the default session.
4. If a participant has tags, all sessions are certified whose session code is in the participants' tags.

Sending Certificates via Email

Using the -e and -E options, you can send the certificates via email to the participants. With the -e only those who have not been marked as messaged yet will be sent an Email, while the -E option will send certificates to all participants for which one has been generated.

Adding the -d option prompts a dry run which will only output previews of the mails that would be sent.

Note: When sending the emails, the login data for the mail server will be prompted during the execution of this command.

The configuration for the email sender can be found in settings.py and the template for the message itself is contained as an HTML-file in the workshops' template directory.