Professor endpoints

[Kn99HN]

It would be nice if we have an endpoints for professors with their ratings, reviews and classes taught. What do you think?

Advantages

• This would let users have access to more interesting data. The ability to display professors' rating and reviews would be nice when browsing courses.

Disadvantages

• Adding to the complexity of the codebase
• Requiring Schema restructure

[A1Liu]

Lets do it.

[A1Liu]

I'm thinking that there are 2 possible use cases:

1. A user wants to find classes associated with a specific professor
2. A user wants to find the reviews of a specific professor

I think anything beyond these 2 use cases (i.e. courses over time, full registry of instructors, etc.) is a little overkill. We might be able to provide some extra features as extensions to the 2 functionalities above, but I'm not sure we should go any further than that.

[Kn99HN]

Yeah. I think we should just go with the base case for now. @svasandani feel free to work on this endpoint!

[svasandani]

I think this makes sense. How would users query this endpoint? Right now I think the name would make the most send, but then we should consider serving a full list of instructor names so that client apps can search through it and offer suggestions (it's hard to get the exact name right the first try).

Alternatively, we could handle the searching by ourselves, and have string queries return an array of professor names and IDs that match the search term, and have ID queries return the instructor data. This approach would also be capable of handling the duplicate instructors before we solve that issue.

Let me know which approach you think is best.

[A1Liu]

I think we should definitely go with the searching ourselves option. We'd need to add another field to the instructors table, but that's no biggie.

[Kn99HN]

No need for support for RMP. This can easily be done with their API. We just need a basic professor endpoint.