OJT_Log.

Week two kicked off with a flag ceremony on Monday morning before heading back to the keyboard. This week was all about depth — refining what was built last week, adding major new features, and pushing the system closer to production-ready. By the end of it, CAFÉ was already live.

What I Built This Week

Monday picked up right where last week left off. I finished and refined the conditional question logic — ensuring that hidden fields are properly skipped during validation, answer saving, and response display across all form views (admin, HEI, and public). I also wired up the Repeater field to display correctly in summaries, connected the File Gate to the HEI account flow, and built the Excel export for form responses.

Tuesday and Wednesday were heavily focused on field type expansion and file uploads. I added the Date field type, built out the Repeater sub-field validation, and significantly overhauled the file upload system — extending it to support multiple file uploads per question. I also added date range filters to the forms table and Excel export, implemented the multi-file FileGate, and introduced the Stakeholder role with its own scoped access to forms and dashboard widgets. I also shipped the REST API with personal access tokens (Laravel Sanctum), giving administrators a scoped API to interact with the system programmatically.

Thursday brought two big additions: the Rating question type (configurable star count), an entirely new audience type for Data Requesters, and — Shared Form Access for CHED staff, allowing forms to be co-managed by multiple staff members. I also implemented HEI User Management, letting an HEI admin create and manage sub-users for their institution, and added institution-wide response tracking so HEI managers can see submissions from all users under them.

Friday was a major milestone on two fronts. On the development side, I completed a thorough access control and policy pass — implementing formal Laravel Policies for FileGate and FormResponse, adding created_by ownership tracking to FileGates, building an audience-aware "Access Link" column in the FileGates table, and enforcing API middleware so only enabled admins can access the API. On the operations side, this was the day CAFÉ officially went live — the CHED Staff from our division, HEMIS (Higher Education Management Information System), deployed the application to production. Seeing a system I helped build from scratch get deployed within the same week I started was a moment I won't forget.

Saturday closed the week with the Certificate Template Designer — a Canva-style canvas editor (powered by Konva.js) that lets CHED staff design certificates, map form response fields onto text layers, and bulk-generate and export them as a ZIP of PDFs. I added font options, keyboard shortcuts, PDF A4 orientation support, a live preview overlay, and static text support. I also shipped a Form Copy feature that duplicates a form along with all its sections, fields, and settings.

Started my OJT at CHED Regional Office V this week. After a short orientation, I was handed my first real assignment: build CAFÉ (Custom Adaptive Forms & Evaluations) — a centralized digital portal that lets CHED staff create forms, collect responses from HEIs, students, and stakeholders across Region V, and gate official downloadable files behind form completion.

What I Built This Week

By the end of the three days, I had laid down the entire foundation of the system — from user roles and a custom form builder, to public form pages, a file-gating mechanism, and response analytics.
I set up a multi-role user system (Administrator, CHED Staff, HEI, Stakeholder) where each role only sees what it's supposed to. From there, I built the custom form builder that lets CHED staff create dynamic, typed-question forms and target them to specific audiences. I also implemented the File Gate feature, which lets staff upload files that respondents can only download after completing a linked form.

On the respondent side, I created public-facing form pages, updated the landing page to surface available forms per audience, and built the My Responses page for HEI users to track their submissions. On the admin side, I built dashboard widgets for response stats and wired up the form summary view — with tabbed breakdowns showing aggregate answers per question and individual per-respondent responses.