B&S: Owner ID

[Justin Rundle]

Hey there,

Quick question after revising the instructions its states:

The system you are writing does not interact with these numbers, rather it simply records them.

Is it suffice to generate a random number for the owner ID?

[Thomas Thevis]

Hey Justin,

as far as I understand the assignment, you don't have to and moreover shouldn't generate IDs. Instead, if someone wants to book a record, you supply a textfield or something similar into which the B&S service agent enters the customer ID. That is my understanding of

it simply records them

Regards,
Thomas

[Justin Rundle]

hmmm... I dont think you right... it states nothing of the kind in the instructions so quit simply im not going to implement an extra GUI to accommodate inputting an owner id.

[Thomas Thevis]

Okay, but suppose the same customer wants to book several services. Do you want to generate a new owner ID for each of these booking transactions?
My assignment says nothing about the GUI except for the JTable thing. Therefore, I don't feel it's some kind of additional feature, but the implementation would be simpler. However, as always in the assignment, if you justify your choices, I guess you will be fine.

[Kah Tang]

Originally posted by Justin Rundle:
hmmm... I dont think you right... it states nothing of the kind in the instructions so quit simply im not going to implement an extra GUI to accommodate inputting an owner id.

I'm not sure about your instructions, but in mine it states that it's a customer ID and that the CSR's know their customer id. It wouldn't make much sense if the customer ID would change everytime for the same customer, would it?

[Jethro Borsje]

I agree with Kah and Thomas here. I also have the B&S assignment and it states that the CSR's know the customer ID. It would not make sense to generate random customer ID's if the CSR's know them.

[Justin Rundle]

yeah agreed but the purpose of generating a random customer id is to act as a placeholder, i mean it makes no difference if you generate junk or the user enters in junk does it?

[Jethro Borsje]

The idea is that you should provide the desired functionality to the CSR, IMHO this include GUI elements for entering customer ID.

[Kah Tang]

Originally posted by Justin Rundle:
yeah agreed but the purpose of generating a random customer id is to act as a placeholder, i mean it makes no difference if you generate junk or the user enters in junk does it?

I kinda disagree there. I mean, you have to see this as an assignment for a big time customer. They want you to write a booking system for their contractors, where they can record their customer bookings BY customer id. Having an application where it generates random customer id's won't do them any good.

Besides... what's so hard about writing a dialog to enter an id?

[Zlatan Hajric]

Originally posted by Justin Rundle:
hmmm... I dont think you right... it states nothing of the kind in the instructions so quit simply im not going to implement an extra GUI to accommodate inputting an owner id.

I understand your dilemma about the number to be recorded but you should also consider if there is a possibility to loose points just because you didn't accommodate the user with that extra field. It is not specified as a must but you still have points on the UI.

[Alex Belisle Turcot]

I dont recall this field to be an option, you must allow the user to input his owner id.

The only "constraint" is that you must not alter the id, whatever the user enters is what you keep (as long as it passes validation, if I remember it must be 8 characters long and only digit..)

Regards,
Alex