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ThesisTracker Integration

Chapter 09 of the ResearchTools manual. Back to table of contents.

This repository is one half of a two-repository system. The other half, JdUmuhoza/ThesisTracker, is where the form catalogue, field maps, and the student-facing UI/UX live (see the 2026 roadmap item in 00-purpose.md). Neither repository's .claude/CLAUDE.md or this manual duplicates that project's own documentation; this chapter is only the map of where the two meet, so the relationship stays discoverable instead of being findable only by reading Architecture.md prose.

Two files named alike, two different scopes

  • Architecture.md — this repository's own agent/skill/command architecture, seven layers, entirely internal to ResearchTools.
  • NEW_ARCHITECTURE.md — the shared architecture document for the UQAC form engine, the system the two repositories make up together. It is committed identically to main in both repositories (byte-for-byte, checked by sha256sum), so either checkout tells the whole story. It carries the twenty planned units (RT-* on this side, TT-* on ThesisTracker's), their delivery status, and the data model and lifecycle both sides agree on. That content is deliberately not repeated here: a second copy is exactly the kind of drift this manual split exists to avoid (see 00-purpose.md).

The boundary: form-service

The dependency between the two systems runs one way only: ThesisTracker calls the form service, never the reverse. ThesisTracker itself does not belong to this repository's own component graph and is a separate system.

deploy/form-service/ (the form-service skill, chapter 04) wraps the PDF ingest, widget-dump, filling, and PAdES-signing scripts in a stateless FastAPI application, so ThesisTracker calls one HTTP service (/pdf/widgets, /pdf/fill, /pdf/sign, /pdf/validate, plus GET /publications) instead of shelling out to Python itself. The service is reached only over a private network behind a shared secret compared in constant time, and refuses to start when that secret is unset or too short; nothing is persisted beyond a certificates volume and a disk-cached, rate-limited publications cache. Full diagram and detail: Architecture.md, "Layer 7 - Deployment (form-service HTTP API)".

What lives where

Concern Owner
PDF ingest contract, widget dump, filling, PAdES signing, HTTP transport ResearchTools (form-service skill + deploy/form-service/)
Form catalogue, field maps, student profile ThesisTracker
Twenty-unit delivery plan, shared data model, cross-repo decisions NEW_ARCHITECTURE.md (both repos)

When a plan changes something both sides depend on, NEW_ARCHITECTURE.md is the file that records it — update it there, in both checkouts, rather than in this manual.

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