Design documents, ER diagrams, and database theory documentation for the Agora academic collaboration platform.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
DOMAIN_DESCRIPTION.md |
Project proposal — domain overview, entities, relationships, and expected functionality |
design_doc.md |
Design document — ER diagram walkthrough, weak entities, 3NF normalization steps, final relational schema, and business rules |
er_diagram.png |
Complete ER diagram showing all 18 tables, primary/foreign keys, and cardinalities |
er_diagram.dbml |
ER diagram source — importable into dbdiagram.io for interactive exploration |
Agora is a campus-exclusive academic collaboration platform for verified SCSU students (@stcloudstate.edu). It provides course-scoped Q&A, resource sharing, study groups, and a social feed — all backed by a MySQL database designed from scratch by the team.
Live application: Agora on Railway
Flask App (Agora repo)
├── Jinja2 templates — server-side rendering
├── SQLAlchemy ORM — data models in app/models.py
├── Blueprint routing — auth, posts, forum, groups, events, etc.
├── MySQL (Railway) — production database (designed in database repo)
└── Huskies Connect API — live campus events, news, organizations
The relational schema contains 18 tables normalized to 3NF. Full details are in design_doc.md.
Weak entities: Enrollment (depends on User + Course), BorrowRequest (depends on Resource)
Self-referential relationship: Follow (User follows User)
Many-to-many junctions: PostTag, ProblemTag, Enrollment
Key business rules enforced at the database level are documented in design_doc.md Section 5.
| Repository | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Agora | Production Flask application |
| database | MySQL schema, queries, indexes, transactions, MongoDB component |
| docs | This repo — design documents and ER diagrams |
MIT License