April 4th – Project Update
Code Implementation
There was a lot of formatting that needed to be done today to finally polish off the JSP back end of the application. I took the day to put the finishing touches on the web application. The first task i undertook today was to format the excel reports that I was generating so that they were in a more user friendly form when downloaded onto the administrators local desktop. This involved changing some of the format and removing some unnecessary detail in the Excel file.
The layout of the application changed to a more centralized model yesterday and to reflect this some formatting needed to be done to the existing JSP pages. All of the return to home links were redirecting to a non existant page so I had to edit all of the JSP pages to now return to the employee selection screen.
Upon further testing of the navigation of the application I found myself becoming extremely frustrated with the fact that once I entered the reports screen for any employee and any of their activities I would have to navigate back to the employee selection screen. This upon reflection didn’t seem to be efficient in any sense. I tested this out on two other people and it was identified as an area of frustration amongst them also. The situation should be able to be bypassed by clicking the back button on the browser but this isn’t acceptable. Utilizing the session parameters I had been passing I made a return to previous page link passing the hidden credentials parameter allowing for the session to remain intact after clicking the back button. Upon further testing this massively reduced the frustration of navigation amongst myself and my two testers. This button was also custom designed to include the persons name the administrator is enquiring about. This is just done to promote good H.C.I and userability.
The layouts of the table were causing me a problem. Row entries that were too long were extending the table off the screen and was no favorable on the user to view. I altered the tables in the application with some C.S.S to confine the table and stop them from moving and word wrap their contents so that they would be favorable to read.
The reports themselves and in particular their titles were the next thing that I needed to look into because I wanted to be able to uniquely and clearly allow the administrator to easily identify the report that he downloaded on a user. I used the session parameter for the username and incorporated it into the title of the excel file and then I took a snapshot of the system date at the time that the report was generated and amended that to the end of the filename to stop files being overwritten upon download because each file would have a different name due to the name being related on the system time and date.
The logo on the front page of the application seemed to be repeating after the maximum screen resolution was reached so I amended the logo to drop down far below the screen so that no images would repeat. This has been implemented and is working.
The next function I incorporated was a clear option for each users details so that the system administrator would have the possibility to clear the records for any user. I felt that this was necessary to incorporate as administrator would then have the option to clear the contents of tables of users that had no suspicious activity as there is no real value in keeping legitimate usage records of users.
The jsp application I then made externally accessible once I have my laptop on at home with tomcat running. I just created a temporary domain name and attributed it to the URL address of router and then port forwarded all requests to port 80 to my computers IP Address. I have since accessed the externally available website application from a host of different types of machines such as pc’s, laptops, netbooks, and even i-phones. The fact that the website application is accessible on i-phone is a handy feature as it means that systems administrators could keep track of activity whilst on the move. I thought this was a handy feature.
