Graduate Thesis Manager

An ASP.NET MVC portal for managing the graduate-thesis workflow—from course and module administration to thesis publication, student registration, status tracking, messaging, and reporting.

Important

This is a legacy educational project originally built in 2018 with Serenity 3.7.7 and ASP.NET MVC 5. It is useful as a portfolio and reference project, but its dependencies are no longer suitable for an internet-facing production deployment without a planned framework and dependency upgrade.

Features

• Role- and permission-based administration
• Course, module, and lecturer management
• Thesis-pool publishing with document uploads
• Student thesis registration and status tracking
• Internal messaging, Excel export, PDF reporting, and email pickup
• FluentMigrator-based database initialization

Technology

Area	Technology
Server	C#, ASP.NET MVC 5, .NET Framework 4.7.2
UI	Serenity 3.7.7, TypeScript 2.8, Bootstrap 3, jQuery
Data	SQL Server, Dapper, FluentMigrator
Reports	EPPlus, jsPDF, wkhtmltopdf

Repository layout

.
|-- GraduateThesisManager.sln
|-- GraduateThesisManager/
|   `-- GraduateThesisManager.Web/
|       |-- App_Start/       # application startup and migrations
|       |-- Migrations/      # database schema and seed data
|       |-- Modules/         # MVC/Serenity feature modules
|       |-- Imports/         # generated client and MVC typings
|       `-- Scripts/Content/ # legacy front-end assets
`-- .github/                 # CI and contribution templates

Local development

Prerequisites

• Windows 10 or later
• Visual Studio 2022 with ASP.NET and web development and the .NET Framework 4.7.2 targeting pack
• SQL Server Express LocalDB (installed by the Visual Studio workload)
• Node.js 18 or later
• NuGet CLI, or Visual Studio package restore

Run the application

1. Clone the repository.

2. Restore NuGet packages:

   nuget restore GraduateThesisManager.sln

3. Restore the TypeScript declaration packages:

   npm ci --prefix GraduateThesisManager/GraduateThesisManager.Web

4. Open GraduateThesisManager.sln in Visual Studio.

5. Set GraduateThesisManager.Web as the startup project and run it with IIS Express.

The default connection uses (LocalDB)\MSSQLLocalDB. On first start, the app creates GraduateThesisManagerDB and applies all migrations. To use another SQL Server, override the GraduateThesisManager connection string locally; never commit credentials.

The original Serenity seed creates an admin account for local bootstrap. Treat it as a development-only account and change its password immediately after first login.

Configuration and runtime data

• Development email is written to App_Data/Mail instead of being sent.
• Uploaded files, emails, logs, and local database files under App_Data are runtime data and are intentionally ignored by Git.
• The release transform disables debug output, uses remote-only error pages, and requires secure authentication cookies. Deploy behind HTTPS.
• Keep production connection strings and SMTP credentials in deployment-time configuration, not in Web.config or Serenity.CodeGenerator.config.

Quality checks

Pull requests are built by GitHub Actions on Windows. The workflow restores both NuGet and npm dependencies and compiles the solution in Release configuration.

This repository currently has no automated test suite. Adding integration tests around authentication, message ownership, registrations, and migrations is the highest-value next engineering step.

Security status

The repository includes targeted fixes for the most serious issues found during its cleanup: committed credentials and runtime data, unauthenticated file access, message batch SQL injection, and cross-user message operations. The dependency stack is still legacy. Read SECURITY.md before deploying or reporting a vulnerability.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development workflow. By participating, you agree to follow the Code of Conduct.

License

Licensed under the MIT License.