Documentation isn't really clear for new setup

[jasonkliu]

Not sure what category this should be in, but setting up a new instance is not terribly easy.

A few issues that could be better documented:

• When creating a new instance and using CAS auth, you have to use your netid (or any cas username) as you login. The directions seem to say that you can just leave the password field blank, but with the wrong username you can't log in at all.
• Possibly a better designed "error denied" page. I couldn't figure out why it failed for a while and had to dig through the database.
• For some reason, when I created a new location and loc group I wasn't authorized to start a shift in it. This is due to the can_signup? function in user.rb. I'm not exactly sure what the problem was but modifying the function to always return true made it work temporarily.
• If you don't have a payform the app crashes. This is from app/views/payforms/show.html.erb

[njlxyaoxinwei]

Explanations/Improvements for the few issues about setting up new instance:

1. We can add to the first-run page that if using CAS, you need to enter the correct netid as login
2. Maybe we should single out the "User netid not found in DB" scenario and have a special error page for that
3. this is due to "Permission" not set, and that is one thing I have in mind for a while now too. The user needs to have signup permission of the loc_group to be able to view open_signup slots in the shifts schedule. The way a user acquires a certain permission is through the roles it has. Each role has a set of permissions. One would expect a superuser to have all the permissions there are, but that is not the case, since no roles are defined yet after the first-run configuration, thus the superuser has no permissions. I would propose circumvent this by checking for superuser in every method like "can_signup?". As far as I know, these few predicates in user.rb are the only ones that do not check for superuser, that's why superusers can do most things but not signing up for shifts.
4. Again, this is due to the fact that no roles have been defined yet but the name of the role is requested in the payform view. Counter-intuitively, it is not due to non-existent payform, which I believe would give a 500 error.

[jasonkliu]

One addition to the first-run script might be to create a location / loc group for the department; trying to start a shift and seeing a blank drop-down box is slightly counterintuitive.

Thanks for the input.