April 1st – Project Update
Selecting a Name For the Project
Considering I have been developing the project for past 8 months it would seem that it would be about time that a name to realised for the project. Having discussed the theme of names with my supervisor he alerted me to the fact that the industry norm in to generally name your app in the form of ”<FIRST LETTER OF LANGUAGE IMPLEMENTED>”-”<NAME>”. This led me down the path where I knew I was going to have a name for the application in the form of J-”<NAME>”. I ran through a few names I could possibly use, the one I ended up selecting was J-MON.
Designing a Site Banner
I designed a logo/site banner for the back end of the application just to give it more of that application feel.The logo/site banner can be downloaded here.
Code Implementation
I continued on from where the implementation left off yesterday and began to look into providing reports for the dynamically generated jsp pages. This was a different implementation to that of the static reporting. This was due to the fact that the arguments for the dynamic jsp pages were being passed in by parameter values which were specified on the referrer page. Changing the content type of the excel display page to excel meant that the parameters were being passed in but not read. Due to this I had to amend my methods, After some time trying out different things I got it to work and I now have site wide reporting on usage of different forms and employees.
I also rolled out the use of hidden parameters throughout the entire JSP site to promote in essence what would be one continuous consistent session for the user. This meant that the user and their options, whatever they choose as they navigate throughout the site would be remembered and passed in hidden parameters without distraction or disruption to the urls. It just seems to make the whole session easier for the user to navigate through.
Last night I implemented a summary page of sorts whereby any employee could be selected from a drop down menu and then their credential details such as their computer name, mac_address, and quantitative activity could be displayed. Initially this was meant to be just a summary page but after implementing it there seemed to be a certain central feel to it and after sketching out a few site maps it seems better to centralise everything to the summary page. I have developed all the JSP pages, both dynamic and static now for all the functionality I envisaged and I am now going to attempt to refine down these twenty or thirty pages down to a centralized core site of under ten pages.
I also developed a new “index.jsp” page to be the starting point of the site where users are greeted upon entering the site. The reason being that although I don’t plan to do “much if any” graphic design on the back-end application due to the fact that it is largely irrelevant and time consuming, it is nice to have some sort of logo greet you as you initiate your contact with any site.
