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URLyBird requirements confusion

 
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Hello there,
This is another one of those "Is this right or am I just being stupid?" moments. I've had a lot of them doing this project.

My confusion relates to the overall working of the URLyBird booking system; at the moment I'm just trying to visualise the UI, and it doesn't make sense.

No where in the requirements for the User Interface does it say that you need to provide functionality for adding records. And yet, in the DBMain interface it clearly shows methods for both adding and deleting records.

After writing a basic class to have a look in the data file I've been provided, I can see that there are about 30 records. I haven't checked, but I assume some are booked and others unbooked, and in the UI you need to provide functionality for booking a record. Fair enough, that makes sense.

But say Hotel Foobar in Nowheresville has 2 rooms available on the 13th of the month and want to sell the bookings through URLyBird; that means you are adding rather than booking records. Currently I have server side code that allows me to do this .... but its not in the requirements for the UI.



Has anyone done this blooming thing? Are we only supposed to do a server-side implementation of the methods and not bother with the client side functionality? Have I missed something? Or is this another example of Sun writing crap documentation for stuff they charge �160 a wack for?

Confusedly,

Jon
 
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Has anyone done this blooming thing? Are we only supposed to do a server-side implementation of the methods and not bother with the client side functionality? Have I missed something? Or is this another example of Sun writing crap documentation for stuff they charge �160 a wack for?


Hi Jon,

It is indeed true that you need to implement server-side functionality for adding and removing records, even though the GUI will not (need to) use this functionality.

The possibility that records are added or removed adds some depth to the locking mechanism. I assume that's why they have been included.

Sun might have opted to require us to add UI functionality to add and remove records, but that would mostly make the assignment bigger, but not necessarily a better test of our developer skills (since it would be more of the same).

Frans.
 
Jon Poulton
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Thanks for the reply Frans, its cleared things up. I would prefer it if they would explicitly state this in the instructions.html, but hey, thats Sun for you.

Cheers

Jon
 
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I'm having similar confusion(s) as well. If any one would clarify it would be really helpful.

1. One of the requirement is that you need to check the date of booking lies 48 hours from the NOW. When checking that do we have to check if the date of room availability?

2. In the data provided, I can see the date of availability like 2002,2003,2004 and all. Theorectically all of them are available, right?

3. When doing a search, do I have to limit the period of checking? because why would someone go and search for the rooms available in the past?

4. When doing a booking do we have to ask for the number of days he wants to stay or just the end date?

5. The end date is the one to go into 'availability' field of the record right?

Your help would be much apprecitated.

Thanks,

Muthaiah.
 
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Originally posted by Muthaiah Ram:

1. One of the requirement is that you need to check the date of booking lies 48 hours from the NOW. When checking that do we have to check if the date of room availability?

2. In the data provided, I can see the date of availability like 2002,2003,2004 and all. Theorectically all of them are available, right?

3. When doing a search, do I have to limit the period of checking? because why would someone go and search for the rooms available in the past?

4. When doing a booking do we have to ask for the number of days he wants to stay or just the end date?

5. The end date is the one to go into 'availability' field of the record right?



1. Check the system date and the available date, the system date may not be more than 2 days prior to available date.

2. No, see point 1

3. I didn't limit it in the search, my reasoning was that the user may be interested in booked records if only to confirm a booking, ofcourse it may have other uses as well. Whatever you do document it and defend it.

4. No, a room is only available for 1 day.

5. No, see point 4
 
Jon Poulton
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OK. I've found yet another problem in the specification document. When describing the format of the data file it says:

Data Section. Repeat to end of file: 1 byte flag. 00 implies valid record, 0xFF implies deleted record.

As I was looking through this I realised something. 0xFF is not a valid value for a byte. How can you have a 1 byte flag reading 0xFF (which is 255 in decimal) when the valid ranges for a byte are between -128 and 127? I guess for now I assume that anything with a non-zero flag is deleted.
 
Jon Poulton
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My mistake. I just realised 0xFF should come out as a negative number (8 bits with all their bits set to 1). Not sure why my IDE is complaining its compile error though.
 
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