BITS nowCampus Portal for Wireless Devices

SHILADITYA MANDAL, KAUSTAV GHOSH, ANAND GOYAL & OMKAR HANDE

Overview & Scope

Overview• The Campus Portal is developed using university campus as the setting and

the domain for applications developed for the portal for wireless devices.

• The application focuses on the immediate needs of both students and faculty while they aren’t in their respective

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OverviewGeneral student on-the move needs like :-

•Maintaining Time Table

•Classrooms for respective classes

•Faculty chamber

•Checking whether faculty is in chamber or not

•Calendar upcoming exams, assignments, holidays etc.

•Notifications if any class is cancelled

•Putting phone on silent during class

•Filling up mess option

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Scope• The scope of application may not be restricted to the mentioned features

only, but can extend by including features like maintaining marks, speed-dial to MedC/Doctor, Security Gate, Faculty chamber etc. Also it can sync with college database/SWD/ARC to give immediate notifications for any notices etc.

• Apart from Campus Portal, with minor modifications and keeping the architecture similar, this can be used in large Corporate.

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Functional Modules

Student Modules•Add or Remove Course : A student has the functionality to add a course to his schedule. For example, the courses that he/she may be attending informally. Prior to confirmation, the application checks for clashes with existing schedule.

•Choose Mess : Students can choose their mess directly from their mobile devices. Mess option availability appears as a notification to the user whenever mess admins enable this option.

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Faculty Modules•See list of registered students : A faculty user has the functionality to view all the students and their contact detail who registered under a course(s) taught by him/her

•Cancel Classes : A faculty can cancel a particular class in his schedule by just pressing a button. The same is notified to the students in form of a “Notification” on their Android devices.

•Quick Message : Ability to send a message to the group of students registered under a course

•Set Chamber Availability : Faculty can set his chamber availability, i.e., “Available” or “Away” whenever in chamber or free to attend students. A student user on the other hand, can view the availability status of each faculty member that he/she wants to approach

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Common Modules•Miscellaneous Contact Information : SWD, Medical Center, ARC, Cafeteria, Cab service etc.

•View Course, Faculty or Student pages

•Edit personal Details

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Background Tasks• Reminder : The system sends a reminder to the student 10 minutes prior to

his/her scheduled class

• Auto Silent during class: The phone automatically enters “Silent” mode during class hours and goes back to normal otherwise.

• Receive Broadcast Messages

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Administrator Role• Send Broadcast messages

• Monitoring/Modification of database

• Reset password

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Non functionalRequirements

Components• Front end mobile application

• Background service

• Web server(Apache)

• Database server(MySQL)

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Background Service• The UI thread(where user gives touch/text input to screen will run

independently of the background service.

• Background service is basically an AsyncTask.

• android.os.AsyncTask<Params, Progress, Result>

• This class allows to perform background operations and publish results on the UI thread without having to manipulate threads and/or handlers.

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Background service• Service is started once the client installs the application on a wireless device.

• The background service will always run, irrespective of whether application is running/not running or phone is locked

• Even if phone is switched off, the service will automatically start once the phone switches on(uses Broadcast Receivers).

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System InterfacesDevelopment:◦ IDE: Eclipse 3.7.2

◦ Java SDK 1.6

◦ Android SDK v20.0.2

Drawing Tools: ArgoUML

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User Interfaces• Home screen: Grid view of all functions available. Each grid item consists of

an Image Button and corresponding title

• Most functional Activities(An activity is a single, focused thing that the user can do) will be List views – student/faculty/course profile, contact lists, etc.

• Horizontal and vertical scroll bars will be used to support varying screen sizes

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Notifications• Outside normal UI, reminders and updates

conveyed to user via notifications in the status bar.

• For example, class cancellation notification/broadcast messages.

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Hardware Interfaces• Client Side: Wireless devices running with Wi-Fi/GPRS connectivity.

• Server Side: Remote machine hosting Apache web server – ability to receive HTTP GET/POST requests.

• Central database server

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Software Interfaces• Client Side: Android OS

• Server Side: Apache server hosts all PHP scripts which processes the requests from the application front end.

• Database server: The PHP scripts interact with the MySQL server either on the same machine/remote server.

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Security• Username, passwords, and other private information cannot be extracted

from either the web server or front end application without authorization.

• Encryption of password(md5) before sending over network for authentication.

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Reliability• The front end application will work perfectly even if network connection is

unstable(AsyncTask).

• Also, reliability depends a lot on the status of the central database server(already in place). If the central database server is down, the application might not work as expected, but all cached data will still be visible.

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ResponseResponse of application depends on 3 things:◦ Responsiveness of client’s wireless device

◦ Network strength and quality

◦ Amount of network data download/upload

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Use-Case Diagram

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Logical Database

Sample Enrolled Relation Table

Thank You! Questions?

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