Submission Metadata

Note: The content mentioned here may be subject to change. We will try not to make backwards incompatible changes to the platform, but we do reserve the right to make breaking changes to anything described here.

The file /autograder/submission_metadata.json contains information about the current and previous submissions. It contains the following information:

{
  "id": 123456, // Unique identifier for this particular submission
  "created_at": "2018-07-01T14:22:32.365935-07:00", // Submission time
  "assignment": { // Assignment details
    "due_date": "2018-07-31T23:00:00.000000-07:00",
    "group_size": 4, // Maximum group size, or null if not set
    "group_submission": true, // Whether group submission is allowed
    "id": 25828, // Gradescope assignment ID
    "course_id": 1234, // Gradescope course ID
    "late_due_date": null, // Late due date, if set
    "release_date": "2018-07-02T00:00:00.000000-07:00",
    "title": "Programming Assignment 1",
    "total_points": "20.0" // Total point value, including any manual grading portion
  },
  "submission_method": "upload", // Can be "upload", "GitHub", or "Bitbucket"
  "users": [
    {
      "email": "student@example.com",
      "id": 1234,
      "name": "Student User"
    }, ... // Multiple users will be listed in the case of group submissions
  ],
  "previous_submissions": [
    {
      "submission_time": "2017-04-06T14:24:48.087023-07:00",// previous submission time
      "score": 0.0, // Previous submission score
      "results": { ... } // Previous submission results object
    }, ...
  ]
}

Rate limiting schemes

You can use submission_metadata.json to implement arbitrary rate limiting schemes. For instance, to limit the number of submissions within a 24 hour period, you can count the number of entries in previous_submissions which are within the last 24 hours, and display that information in the top level output field.

If a student's submission should be rate limited, you can add a message to the top level output, and merge that with the results object from the previous submission. This way, students will keep their last valid score, but they'll know that they can't submit anymore.

When implementing such schemes, be sure to compute time periods based on the current submission's "created_at" (submission time) - otherwise, re-running the autograder will cause the rate limits to be computed based on the current system time.