Token System¶

Description¶

The token system implements a queue based allocation system for handling customers with requests in a FCFS (First Come, First Served) manner. The motivation behind this code was to streamline the Answer Sheet Grading doubt session or, as it is called here in IIT Bombay, the "Crib Session", for the course in which I am a Teaching Assistant.

Dependencies¶

Google Forms ¶

The project, to facilitate ease of access on the clients' (Students) and the servers' (Teaching Assistants), uses Google Forms to supply the input data stream. To use Google Forms, the user of the code must have access to Google Forms and hence also must have a Google Account.

Operating System¶

The project has been written in Python3 and compiled into a standalone executable using PyInstaller 3.4 and tested on two systems:

Ubuntu 18.04.1
Windows 10

Note

For Linux based systems, the python executable depends on linking of some libraries which may require latest packages available on the said systems. The source code is available for those who would like to use or build the program from source.

Also for Ubuntu systems, updates can be performed as:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Setup¶

The program along with the credentials.json file which is required to connect to the Google Sheets API and a sample configuration file can be found in release hosted on Github:

Release Version 1.0

The tar.gz version is for Linux while .zip for Windows.

Info

The first time you run the program, you'll have to login to your Google ID to provide the program access to read your Google Sheets

Warning

Note that the archives don't have a sub-folder and hence extracting releases all the contents into the current directory.

Linux¶

First extract the downloaded release:

mkdir token
tar -xzvf <PATH_TO_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION>/token_v1.0.tar.gz -C token
cd token

Then the executable must be given execute permissions and can be run as follows:

chmod +x generic
./generic

Windows¶

Extract the ZIP archive into a folder and run generic.exe

Setting up Google Forms¶

To setup the Google Forms and Google Sheets environment to work with the program go to the Google Forms page.

Configuration¶

For easy configurability without having to edit any code, the project supports a configuration file. Detailed description of the components of the file can be found here

Graphical User Interface¶

The GUI is used to display the allocation to everyone (even the servers) as this is the only output (other than the debug output on the terminal). Sample Display The GUI supports upto 12 queues in the form of 2 rows with 6 queues in each. The above image shows a sample with 6 such queues.

Sr. No.	Brief Info	Long Description
Row 1	Headers	Queue names obtained from the configuration file
Row 2	ID	Students' Unique Roll Number/ID
Row 3	Name	Students' Name or anything other parameter
Row 4	Queue Size	Number of waiting requests