UISB App — Smart Attendance & Academic Platform
UISB App is a comprehensive academic management system built for the University of Ibadan School of Business, covering the complete academic lifecycle for postgraduate and undergraduate students. It serves six distinct user roles — students, lecturers, exam officers, hub managers, non-academic staff, and super admins — each with a dedicated portal, role-aware dashboard, and a tailored permission set enforced throughout the application.
The platform is built on CodeIgniter 4.7 with CodeIgniter Shield 1.2 for authentication and RBAC, backed by a 47-table MySQL schema across 36 migrations. A decoupled service layer (QrTokenService, PdfService, ExcelService, NotificationService) keeps controllers thin and enables code reuse across the academic, hub, and admin sections. TCPDF handles PDF generation for transcripts and reports; phpspreadsheet handles Excel bulk uploads and exports.
At the academic core is a QR-code attendance system with 30-second TOTP rotating tokens — a SHA256 hash-based approach that prevents replay attacks while tolerating one time-window of network latency. A cron endpoint (protected by CRON_SECRET) auto-creates attendance sessions from the lecture timetable and auto-closes expired ones. Results follow a multi-stage pipeline (draft to submitted to approved or rejected) with automatic grade calculation from CA and exam scores, bulk Excel import with validation, exam-officer approval with rejection feedback, and official TCPDF transcript generation with CGPA calculation.
Beyond academics, the platform includes a multi-hub ecosystem for regional learning centres: an Agriculture module (farm sections, production records, sales transactions), a Retail/Store module (inventory, buy/sell transactions), a Transport module (vehicle fleet, booking requests, trip logging, maintenance scheduling), and a Cybercafe module (computer sessions, hour-based billing). Hub managers operate independently within their assigned hub, while the super admin oversees programmes, courses, sessions, users, and all hub registrations.
Key Features
41 features built into this project
Challenges & Solutions
Technical problems encountered during development and how each was resolved.
Implementing replay-proof QR attendance without burdening students with app installs required a server-side TOTP design: the lecturer's browser fetches a new QR token via a polling API every 30 seconds, and the server validates the scanned token against a ±1 window hash. A course-governor fallback was added so that a designated peer student can manually record attendance if a classmate's QR scan fails, maintaining auditability without blocking the class.
Automating attendance session lifecycle without a queue worker was solved with a cron-protected HTTP endpoint that runs every minute. It reads the lecture_timetables table, matches the current day and time window, creates attendance_sessions that do not yet exist, and closes any sessions whose end_time has passed. The endpoint is secured with a CRON_SECRET environment variable validated via hash_equals() to prevent unauthorised calls.
Supporting six distinct user roles within a single CodeIgniter 4 app without duplicating view logic required a role-aware DashboardController that redirects each authenticated user to their portal on login, combined with a RoleFilter middleware applied per route group. The AuthGroups config defines a permission matrix so that adding or revoking access to any feature requires only a config change, not new middleware classes.
Modelling the multi-hub ecosystem — agriculture, retail, transport, and cybercafe — as independent operational modules under a single hubs table required each module to have its own set of tables cascading off hub_id, with hub managers scoped strictly to their assigned hub. The transport module alone needed four tables (vehicles, bookings, trips, maintenance) with a booking approval workflow mirroring the academic results pipeline, ensuring the same approval-pattern consistency across completely different business domains within the same application.
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