Student complaint system

Students raise complaints — missing marks, facilities, a lecturer — which route to the right office, carry a deadline, and close with a documented resolution. Optionally without saying who they are.

This is the one where conditional fields stop being a neat trick: “who submitted this” must be absent, not hidden, when a complaint is anonymous.

Resource	What it holds
Department	The office that answers
Topic	A category, its department, and its SLA in hours
Complaint	The ticket
Attachment	Evidence; a complaint has many
Comment	The thread, some of it internal
StatusChange	Every move, who made it and why
Resolution	How it ended — one per complaint

1. The app

Next.js

pnpm create flare-framework complaints
cd complaints
docker compose up -d

Cloudflare

pnpm create flare-framework complaints --stack cloudflare
cd complaints

2. Routing

npx flare gen resource Department --icon building --group Setup \
  --fields 'name:string!, headId:string?'

npx flare gen resource Topic --icon tags --group Setup \
  --fields 'name:string!, slaHours:int, department:belongsTo(Department)'

The SLA lives on the topic, not in code. “Harassment: 4 hours, facilities: 72” is a policy decision that changes without a deploy, and putting it in a table is what makes that true.

3. The ticket, and anonymity done properly

npx flare gen resource Complaint --icon message-square-warning --group Tickets \
  --fields 'ticketNo:string!, subject:string, description:text, anonymous:boolean, submitterId:string if anonymous == false, priority:enum(low,normal,high,urgent), status:enum(open,assigned,escalated,resolved,closed), assigneeId:string?, topic:belongsTo(Topic)'

The clause to look at:

submitterId:string if anonymous == false

Tick “anonymous” and the submitter field disappears from the form, stops being required by the validator, and — the part that matters here — the column is nulled. Not hidden. Nulled.

That distinction is the whole feature. A hidden input stops the browser sending a value; it does nothing about the value already in the row. So the obvious implementation — render the field conditionally in React — produces a system where a student fills in a complaint, has second thoughts, ticks anonymous, submits, and their id is still sitting in the database next to it. In this project that is not a bug, it is a broken promise.

The column is nullable even though the field reads as required, because “required” here means required when it applies.

Anonymity is more than a column

Nulling submitterId is necessary and not sufficient. An anonymous complaint still has a createdAt precise to the millisecond, and if the cohort is small that is identifying on its own. Think about who can read the audit trail, and whether a department head seeing “submitted 14:03, Tuesday” can narrow it to one person. That thinking is your project; the column is the easy half.

4. The thread and the trail

npx flare gen resource Attachment --icon paperclip --group Tickets \
  --fields 'file:file:[image,pdf,document]:10mb, complaint:belongsTo(Complaint)'

npx flare gen resource Comment --icon message-circle --group Tickets \
  --fields 'body:text, internal:boolean, authorId:string, complaint:belongsTo(Complaint)'

npx flare gen resource StatusChange --icon history --group Tickets \
  --fields 'fromStatus:enum(open,assigned,escalated,resolved,closed)?, toStatus:enum(open,assigned,escalated,resolved,closed), reason:text?, changedById:string, complaint:belongsTo(Complaint)'

file:[image,pdf,document] accepts three kinds and refuses the rest, by checking the bytes rather than trusting the extension.

internal:boolean on a comment is the difference between what the student sees and what the office says to itself. The field is one word; enforcing it is a policy and a filter in your read path, which is yours to write.

StatusChange is an append-only log. Nothing updates it; rows are only added. That is what makes “who closed this, and when” answerable six months later — and it is why the status history is a table rather than a previousStatus column that only remembers one step.

5. The resolution

npx flare gen resource Resolution --icon check --group Tickets \
  --fields 'summary:text, resolvedById:string, rating:rating?, complaint:belongsTo(Complaint)!'

The ! is one-to-one: a complaint resolves once. Enforced by a unique index, so two officers closing the same ticket at the same moment cannot both succeed — one gets a 409 naming the field, instead of both appearing to work.

rating:rating? is the satisfaction score, 1–5, optional because most people do not answer.

6. Run it

npx flare migrate
npx flare seed:resource Department 6
npx flare seed:resource Topic 12
npx flare seed:resource Complaint 50
npx flare seed:resource Comment 80
npx flare seed:resource Resolution 20
npx flare dev

What you still owe

• The SLA timer and auto-escalation. A scheduled job comparing createdAt + topic.slaHours against now, moving the status and writing a StatusChange. On Cloudflare that is a cron trigger; on Vercel, a cron route. This is the headline feature of the project.
• The ticket number. ticketNo is unique but nothing fills it in. A before create hook, with a sequence or a date-plus-counter format.
• Routing. “Category decides the department” is already modelled; the assignment to a person within it is your rule.
• The analytics. Mean resolution time per department, top topics, trend over a term.
• Hiding internal comments from the student’s view of the thread.

Make it yours

• Students see only their own tickets. npx flare gen policy Complaint --roles '*' --own submitterId --own-except staff,admin — note this only confines the non-anonymous ones, which is correct: an anonymous complaint has no owner to confine it to, and needs a different rule.
• Keep the trail immutable. npx flare gen policy StatusChange --roles staff,admin --delete-roles admin and tighten update out of it by hand in the policy file.
• An escalation resource if you want escalations tracked separately rather than inferred from StatusChange.