Topic Packages

Questions for the coursework system are organised into topics. One of more topics are stored in a "package", which is stored in the "packages" of the coursework, see and . If the courswork is named "D2", then the packages directory is "course/D2Home/packages". Within the "packages" directory, the directories are named after the packages. Each package has some of the following directories: help, images, image-xml, initParameters, java, jsp, qList, xml. All but the last two of these have basically identical contents to the similarly named directories in the webapps directory, see the Section called Tomcat Web Application Directory Structure in the chapter called Tomcat and the Tomcat Web Application Directory Structure, with the contents of these files being copied to the corresponding webapps directory and sub-directory, with the same package name, or in the case of the java files, being compiled to the "classes" directory.

The "xml" directory holds Xml files defining a topic or topics from which question "jsp", "java" or question list "csv" files: of course, this is only where questions are created from an Xml file and not written by hand, see and the chapter called Question Generation in User Manual for the ExerTran Coursework System.

The "qList" directory holds the "csv" file produced by the automatic generation of a topic or topics from an Xml definition file, see previous paragraph and the chapter called Question Generation in User Manual for the ExerTran Coursework System. The "csv" file holds details of each question in the Xml defintion file. The "csv" file can be directly read into the question list table editor for saving into the question list table, thus easing the population of this table.