TeacherAssistant · Core & Startup

TeacherAssistant - Technical Overview

TeacherAssistant is a desktop application built with PySide6 (Qt) and the custom PySideAbdhUI library. It provides teachers with a unified interface to manage student rosters, educational resources, behavioral observations tracking and etc. The application follows a modular architecture: the entry point main.py bootstraps the environment, establishes a database connection with PostgreSQL via a modal dialog, and instantiates the main window. All global state—theme, fonts, language, and connection settings—is centralised in a singleton AppContext, which persists user preferences to a settings.json file stored in the user’s local application data directory. The UI is constructed by MainWindow (a subclass of AbdhWindow), which features a left navigation panel, a right settings panel, and a central page stack. Pages such as StudentListPage (the default home view), EduResourcesView, EducationalResourceEditor, and DatabaseManagerPage are loaded dynamically without restarting the application.

From a developer’s perspective, the project enforces absolute imports by patching sys.path, and all icons are sourced from Lucide (Free version), compiled into a Qt resource module (resources_rc.py) via a dedicated script. The build pipeline is explicitly documented: after installing the proprietary PySideAbdhUI dependency (via local wheel, editable install, or GitHub), the developer compiles resources, then packages the application with PyInstaller using a custom .spec file. Finally, a Windows installer is generated with InnoSetup. The codebase also includes placeholders for future features (e.g., a disabled “Notebook” button) and supports runtime switching of themes, font families, and interface direction (LTR/RTL). This design makes TeacherAssistant both a production‑ready tool and a well‑documented reference for Qt/PySide application development.

The program execution flow from start to display of the first page is shown in the image below. First of all, the PySideAbdhUI package and other required packages of the program must be installed. To install PySideAbdhUI, you can use:

pip install git+https://github.com/abdhmohammadi/PySideAbdhUI.git

or use a local package to install it. After installing the required packages, env\Scripts\activate must be activated via the terminal. Now the program is ready to run, The steps are summarized in the list below.

1. Sys.path manipulation: Add the src directory to the Python path to allow for absolute imports, This is crucial for making the project runnable from any location
2. Global access setup: Access to configuration files, templates, and themes is set by the AppContext module. app_context holds global state (theme, settings, DPI, resources) and provides helper classes to manage this resources.
3. MainWindow: The main window is created. Then the login dialog for connecting to the database opens.
4. Event loop: Using app.exec() the application starts and the list of students is displayed. For now the page of the Student List is considered as the home page.

Building & creating installer

Building and publishing the application involves the following main steps: