Building the Tutor Controller Layer in Go

Welcome to the next step in building a personal tutor service with DeepSeek models. In the previous lesson, we explored the TutorService struct, which acts as a bridge between managing tutoring session data and generating AI responses. Now, we will focus on the TutorController, a crucial component that manages tutoring sessions and handles student queries by interacting with both the model and service layers. The controller is responsible for orchestrating the flow of data between the student interface and the backend services, ensuring that student interactions are processed efficiently and effectively.

The TutorController struct is the heart of our controller layer. It is responsible for managing tutoring sessions and processing student queries. Let's begin by examining the structure of the TutorController in Go.

package controllers

import (
    "main/app/services"
    "github.com/google/uuid"
)

type TutorController struct {
    tutorService *services.TutorService
    testSession  map[string]string // Simple session storage for testing
}

// NewTutorController initializes a new TutorController.
func NewTutorController(tutorService *services.TutorService) *TutorController {
    return &TutorController{
        tutorService: tutorService,
        testSession:  make(map[string]string),
    }
}

In this snippet, we:

• Import the necessary packages, including our services package and the uuid package for generating unique identifiers.
• Define the TutorController struct, which holds a reference to the TutorService and a testSession map to simulate session management for testing purposes.
• Provide a constructor function, NewTutorController, to initialize the controller with its dependencies.

The testSession map is used to simulate session management for testing. In a real-world application, session management would be handled by a web framework or middleware, but for now, this map allows us to focus on the core logic of the controller.

Before creating a tutoring session, we need to ensure that a student session exists. The EnsureStudentSession method checks if a student ID is present in the testSession map. If not, it generates a new student ID using Go's uuid package.

func (tc *TutorController) EnsureStudentSession() string {
    studentID, exists := tc.testSession["student_id"]
    if !exists {
        studentID = uuid.NewString()
        tc.testSession["student_id"] = studentID
    }
    return studentID
}

This method checks the testSession map for a student_id. If it doesn't exist, a new UUID is generated and stored in the map. The method then returns the student ID, either the newly created one or the existing one.