Exam mode: Attendance checker iPad app shows unassigned students

[SamuelRoettgermann]

Summary

Show unassigned students in a separate "No Room Set" section.

Checklist

General

• This is a small issue that I tested locally.
• I chose a title conforming to the naming conventions for pull requests.

Server

• I strictly followed the server coding and design guidelines.
• I added multiple integration tests (Spring) related to the features (with a high test coverage).
• I documented the Java code using JavaDoc style.

Motivation and Context

When using the iPad attendance checker app, students who were not assigned a room or seat would not be shown in the iPad app.

Description

Now, instead of filtering out unused students, it sets the room and seat fields to reasonable default texts. The iPad app only supports English, so a translation is not required.

Steps for Testing - if you do have an iPad

Prerequisites:

• TS2, TS3, or TS4
• 1 Instructor
• 1 Exam with 2+ students registered who do not have a seat assignment.
• The Attendance Checker app: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/artemis-exam-supervision/id6478390011

1. Log in to Artemis
2. Navigate to your exam's exam management
3. Check the iPad app to see if it shows all students who do not have a room/seat assignment in a special "room" called "No Room set" or something similar to that.
4. Distribute to some rooms using the Distribute button (you can select more rooms than are needed).
5. Repeat step 3, but this time make sure no student is inside that "No Room Set" room anymore, and that room should also not be displayed anymore
6. Manually add some more exam participants to which you don't assign a location
7. Repeat step 3

Steps for Testing - if you don't have an iPad

Prerequisites:

• TS2, TS3, or TS4
• 1 Instructor
• 1 Exam with 2+ students registered who do not have a seat assignment.
• A way to perform GET requests. I personally use Postman, I wrote an explanation on how it can be used in the Steps for Testing of this PR: Development: Add server option for dynamic exam seating distribution #11425

1. Log in to Artemis
2. Navigate to your exam's exam management
3. Check the return value when making a GET request to <artemis-server>/api/exam/courses/{courseId}/exams/{examId}/attendance-checker-information. Check that it contains the students without seat assignments with "No Room set"/"No Seat set".
4. Distribute to some rooms using the Distribute button (you can select more rooms than are needed).
5. Repeat step 3, but this time make sure no student has the "No Room set"/"No Seat set" text
6. Manually add some more exam participants to which you don't assign a location
7. Repeat step 3

Testserver States

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Review Progress

Code Review

• Code Review 1
• Code Review 2

Manual Tests

• Test 1
• Test 2

Test Coverage

Server

Class/File	Line Coverage	Lines
AttendanceCheckerAppExamInformationDTO.java	90.38%	132

Last updated: 2026-01-27 14:29:01 UTC

Screenshots

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Bug Fixes

  • Improved handling of exam user room and seat assignments for both legacy and modern data formats, ensuring accurate attendance information retrieval.
  • Fixed exam user distribution mapping to streamline data processing.

• Tests

  • Added comprehensive test coverage for exam room distribution scenarios, including partial student registration with automatic distribution.

_{✏️ Tip: You can customize this high-level summary in your review settings.}

[coderabbitai]

Walkthrough

The changes refactor the attendance checker DTO to distinguish between legacy and modern data paths for exam user location handling. The distribution logic is simplified by directly mapping exam users instead of using intermediate filtering. Test files are updated to reflect renamed distribution methods from "modern" to "automatic," with helper methods generalized to accept configurable student counts.

Changes

Cohort / File(s)	Summary
DTO Logic Refactoring src/main/java/de/tum/cit/aet/artemis/exam/dto/room/AttendanceCheckerAppExamInformationDTO.java	Reworked ExamUserLocationDTO.plannedFrom to handle legacy vs. modern data paths separately; legacy returns null room ID with fallback display strings, modern uses transient IDs. Removed intermediate set filtering in AttendanceCheckerAppExamInformationDTO.from, now directly maps exam users to DTO objects.
Test Updates & Generalization src/test/java/de/tum/cit/aet/artemis/exam/ExamRoomDistributionIntegrationTest.java	Renamed test methods from "ModernDistribution" to "AutomaticDistribution"; generalized uploadFourRoomsAndDistributeStudentsInExam1() to accept configurable student count parameter. Added new test case for automatic distribution with unseated students and updated test data assertions.

Estimated code review effort

🎯 3 (Moderate) | ⏱️ ~22 minutes

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 2 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 15.38% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%.	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (2 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title directly and accurately summarizes the main change: enabling the attendance checker iPad app to display unassigned students, which is reflected in both the DTO modifications and new test coverage.
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.

_{✏️ Tip: You can configure your own custom pre-merge checks in the settings.}

✨ Finishing touches

• 📝 Generate docstrings

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Post copyable unit tests in a comment
• Commit unit tests in branch bugfix/exam-mode/ipad-attendance-checker-show-unseated-students

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[github-actions]

@SamuelRoettgermann Test coverage has been automatically updated in the PR description.

[github-actions]

End-to-End (E2E) Test Results Summary

	Tests	Passed ✅	Skipped ⚠️	Failed	Time ⏱
End-to-End (E2E) Test Report	223 ran	222 passed	1 skipped	0 failed	1h 23m 25s 836ms

Test	Result	Time ⏱
No test annotations available

[angatha]

Internationalization is not possible this way. Why not use null or at least add a flag that clearly marks this student as unassigned?

[SamuelRoettgermann]

As of right now the iPad attendance checker app only supports English, and it is not currently planned to support more languages.

The reason why we chose to do it this way, instead of directly returning null, is because returning null causes older iPad versions to crash, because they expect the fields to always be non-null. Over the past few weeks we had two exams, and in both cases had some issues because many of the iPads were outdated, both the iOS version as well as the attendance checker app version itself. This means we can't roll out changes that would break backwards-compatibility.

For these reasons, we decided not to return A) a (translated) translation-key, or B) null.

An extra flag might work, but it'd also run into some backwards-compatibility issues.

[anian03]

Tested on TS4 with the iPad app. All students were correctly returned, including those without a room/seat assignment. They were grouped into a separate "room" called "No room set".

Code also LGTM, hardcoding english strings is fine here as we don't support any other languages in the iPad app (and it's the only place this is used). The web app does not show this string