Test sheet generator

This is a simple tool to prepare test sheets. It uses JSON schemas to represent questions and rules to randomly generate test sets and present them in a number of formats.

JSON schema

Questions

Each question is an object of the form:

{
    "type": "<type>",
    "question": "<question>",
    "answers": [],
    "fixed_answers": [],
    "images": [],
    "display_hints": {}
}

Here type is a string representing a type of the question (see below) and question is a text of the question. answers and fixed_answers are optional arrays of strings. images is an optional array of image objects. display_hints is an optional object with front-specific hints. (For example, pdf front uses max_lines hint for open questions to determine the amount of free space on the page for the answer. Same way, it uses max_cols hint for choice questions to determine the number of columns to organize answers into.)

Image objects

Each image attached to a question is described by an object of the form:

{
    "name": "<name>",
    "src": "<src_path>",
    "description": "<description>",
    "width": 0,
    "height": 0
}

Only src field is mandatory and specifies the path to the image. Fronts treat other fields as hints and are allowed to skip them when rendering.

Question pools

Questions are grouped into pools, that represent sets of questions to draw from. Question pools are objects of the form:

{
    "name": "<name>",
    "type": "<type>",
    "questions": []
}

name is a unique id of the pool inside current schema used to reference it in the rules. type is a string specifying a type of pool (see below). questions is an array of question objects.

Test sheets

Each test sheet template contains a number of pools and rules that describe the resulting test sheet. It has following structure:

{
    "name": "<name>",
    "schema": [
		{ "pool_name": "<name>", "args": [] }
	],
    "pools": []
}

name specifies the name of the schema/template. schema is an ordered array of rules objects, that have two fields: pool_name is a name of the pool to draw question from and args is an array of additional options to pass to the generator (see below). pools is an array of question pool objects.

Questions and pools

Supported pool types are:

• Simple pools ('simple'): questions are uniformly randomly selected from this pool.
• Exhaust pools ('exhaust'): once selected, questions are exhausted from the pool, until there are no questions left. After that, the pool resets.

Supported question types are:

• Open questions ('open'): questions with no designated answer options.
• Choice questions ('choice'): single or multiple choice questions.
• Choice questions w/ fixed answers ('fixed'): same as choice questions, but some answer options are fixed and will appear on all sheets (i.e. are exempt from random generation).

Schema rules arguments

Currently schema rules can contain only one argument --- max number of options to get from the answers array.

Command line options

Usage:

testgen filename [-n N] [-f {pdf,tex,html,plaintext}] [-s SEED]
           [-b] [-o OUTFILE] 
           [-h] [--version]

• filename is a name of a template file with JSON schema
• -n: specifies the number of test sheets to generate (default: 1)
• -f or --front: specifies the front-end generator (default: pdf)
• -s or --seed: provide a seed for RNG
• -b or --batch: generate all sheets in a single file
• -o or --outfile: specifies the name for the batch file (only for -b mode)

Requirements

• pylatex for pdf and tex fronts
• jinja2 for HTML front