Install Directory Structure

This directory holds has the following files and directories:-

build.xml

This is the only file in the install directory. It is the file, that Ant uses to control its build operations. It is this file that controls, along with a coursework definition file, what Ant does during a build: what files are moved, compiled, processed and where they end up. Thus, this file is core to the building of the system

bin

This has some basic search and replace commands that I used to find and replace text within the main source code: no more is discussed about these currently.

build

This is created when an Ant build of the sources is performed to hold the class files created by the Java compiler before they are moved into the Tomcat webapp directory structure on a successful build. This directory is not stored in the CVS repository and can be deleted at will between builds.

courses

This directory is where the code for each coursework is stored, i.e. it is where the bulk of the code that makes up a Tomcat webapp is stored. Remember there is one webapp for each coursework for each group of students. The naming of the directories is controlled by the name or code assigned to a particular coursework. Thus, if a coursework has a code "D2", then the sub-directory containing the webapp for this coursework would be called D2Home and this subdirectory would contain a directory D2, which is the Tomcat webapp directory, and a file D2.def. This last file is the coursework definition file for this coursework, and contains information on e-mail addresses, database names and passwords etc. see this section for full details.

CVS

This is created by CVS when the system sources are checked out. The contents of this directory are used by CVS to identify what files have been checked so that the state of these files can be monitored. A CVS directory is created in all the directories that are checked out of the CVS repository. These directories only need to be kept if changes are to be made to the source and written back into the reprository or if it is desirable to update the checked out source with updates to the repository sources.

docs

This is where this manual is stored: it is written with DocBook. The primary file is called ExerTran.xml and it is this that should be used when compiling the manual, e.g. with the command: docbook2html ExerTran.xml

Other documents will be strored here if and when they are created.

lib

This is where the java jar files needed by the compilation are kept. These are copied down from the repository when the sources are checked out or imported. These may be out of date in that there are newer versions of these in existent. It is unlikely that replacing any of them with newer versions will break the compilation. To get the Ant build system to work it is advisable to put the names of these jar files into your Java classpath prior to running an Ant build.

notes

This is where notes are stored during system development. These are unlikely to be of any use to users.

src

This is where all the system sources are held. The structure of this directory is discussed in the next section of the manual