Hope everyone had a great spring break. Though this is a holiday, most of our holidays were spent working on the assignments and projects. As planned, we have completed designing the interface of the Almanac Archive project till the fourth part which is adding a new library and adding new copies of the almanacs. The Image information part and Annotation Information parts are the only ones to be completed. This work might as well be completed in a couple of weeks. Coming to the design parts we have already completed, I’ve discussed the “login” page and the “Add Entry” page in the previous blog post. In this part I will share you the updates on the third and fourth parts of the design.

Basically Julia and Lindsey wanted us to develop the design based on what they had in mind when they wanted to digitalize the almanac archives. They had come up with an interface part listing the flow of the information between different users. The first two parts of the design were directly implemented according to the design document. Once the add entry page has been designed,

We had to redesign the document because of the complexities involved. The “Add New Issue” and the “Add New Copy” pages were kind of similar and we had not much of a difference between both of them since we are yet to be handed over the almanacs.  However, upon the discussion, we have understood that there can be a number of copies for a given issue. The Add new issue page is supposed to contain the Printer, Publisher, Author, Editor, Place of publication, Format, Region, Price etc. The Add new copy contains the issue titles and year which are auto filled from the previous pages. In addition to these, the page also contains a form asking the user to input the Library name and its details.  We also need to add the libraries before we can include the copies. The library needs to include the Library Name, Location, Library Homepage URL and the rights page. The Library call number will also be provided to the user upon the successful inclusion of the library. The respective screenshots of the design are attached below.

During the design, I was stuck up at so many places where I had to sit for hours together on a single error or an exception. But, stack overflow had been very helpful in providing me solutions to my issues. I had to mail Julia very regularly so that the design can be changed and the complexity of the database is reduced and I can easily comprehend what was written in the design document. I had to draw separate flow diagrams for each part of the design so that it will be easier to understand the flow. Hopefully all the hard work put in will be fruitful and the project is deployed as soon as possible.

Technical Details of the design:

User: Administrator

Screenshots of different pages in the design are attached below.

 

Database Tables:

• Fast_Sol_Almanac is the name of the database for the project

The following are the different tables created so far for the design.

 

Continuing my series of videos on self-development, I have watched one more wonderful video which talks about the importance of finding opportunities and how to find those opportunities. Hope it helps in developing positive attitude for achieving one’s own goals.

 

 

On the other hand, the end of the semester is fast approaching and we are busy meeting the deadlines for our project submissions and presentations. Hopefully we finish everything on time including the tasks we were assigned in SIF.