What are the business use cases(semantic operations) at client end?

[Can Zheng]

Hi ranchers,

I'm doing my URLyBird assignment right now, and for the data access part I am required to implement add, delete, find and update operations. But I'm not sure which of these are used in which senarios at the client's perspective. (Of course I've implemented all of them at the data access tier, but how they are used is sort of important for me to design the client end.)

Let me state it more clearly, so my questions are:

1. Do clients(CSRs in my assignment) input records?
2. Do clients delete records? (I can't think of a reason why clients are allowed to delete records)
3. Or do they only make the booking?

And how do I reflect the booking made by the client? It seems we can do it by specifying the owner field of the record. If so, do I need to list the records already booked by a customer?

And how do I respect the 48 hours rule? I noticed there is a date field in the record. Does it mean only records with a date later than "48 hours prior to current time" is effective? Then I can delete all other records? The assignment did not make it clear but had it stated like the following:

They take bookings only within 48 hours of the start of room occupancy

I just don't have enough business knowledge to understand something like that...

Another question:
For my assignment, it stated that the fields in a record should be null terminated, but in the db file supplied it is always padded by 0x20(spaces). So do I conform to this convention or use null(0x00)?

Thanks a lot for anyone who's willing to share his/her opinions. You guys are all my hope
[ July 30, 2006: Message edited by: Can Zheng ]

[Thirumurugan Mylrajan]

Originally posted by Can Zheng:
[QB]Hi ranchers,

I'm doing my URLyBird assignment right now, and for the data access part I am required to implement add, delete, find and update operations. But I'm not sure which of these are used in which senarios at the client's perspective. (Of course I've implemented all of them at the data access tier, but how they are used is sort of important for me to design the client end.)

Let me state it more clearly, so my questions are:

1. Do clients(CSRs in my assignment) input records?
2. Do clients delete records? (I can't think of a reason why clients are allowed to delete records)
3. Or do they only make the booking?

As per the requirement there is no need to input/delete/modify the records on the client. However this must be implemented on the data class. It means the database server should have delete/add functionality, but the clients connecting to it need not implement those.

And how do I reflect the booking made by the client? It seems we can do it by specifying the owner field of the record. If so, do I need to list the records already booked by a customer?

I think the req says that if the owner is not blank, the record is booked. There is also a req that you should be able to list all records.

And how do I respect the 48 hours rule? I noticed there is a date field in the record. Does it mean only records with a date later than "48 hours prior to current time" is effective? Then I can delete all other records? The assignment did not make it clear but had it stated like the following:

The room can be only be booked if its available within 48 hrs from current time. URLYBird company books hotels for travellers on short notice(as a rule only within 48 hrs). So by correlating that you can make sense.

Another question:
For my assignment, it stated that the fields in a record should be null terminated, but in the db file supplied it is always padded by 0x20(spaces). So do I conform to this convention or use null(0x00)?

Many people had the data file padded with spaces instead of nulls. You can use the same format and document in choices.txt

[Can Zheng]

Thanks Thirumurugan

That helps.