UCMB-IMSMilestone 5 presentation

Harlan BroughtonStephen Link

What is it?

Web Based management system

Web based management system started as a project last semester.

Intended to actually be used by the marching band to help maintain synchronicity among members.

What we started with

Originally informed of the idea of the project, and we started with little instruction

We had a strong idea of what we were dealing with, but the devil was in the details.

We found the project to be a good starting ground but ultimately unfinished program.

It seemed like the perfect project: a great challenge that could actually be used.

The IMS (Information Management System) is broken down into six sections:◦ Registration◦ Login ◦ Data Access◦ Members-Only◦ Notification◦ Pep-band Scheduler

Specifications

To gain access to the IMS the end-user must fill out the registration form and submit it.

Once the registration is approved by the band office administration the user will be able to log in and access the rest of the system.

Specifications

Specifications

Member Registration

The user is directed to the Members Registration Page if they do not log in to a preexisting user account

Information can be edited later on

Specifications After registration, the user is sent an email prompt to confirm

registration. This brings the user to a the activation page.

Specifications

Notification System

The notification subsystem serves as a tool for communication between members of the band.

It works similarly to any standard email account, because email is in fact the actual mode of communication used behind the scenes.

Administrators choose who may contact who, based on band membership and status.

Specifications

Media

This table contains five columns which provide information for the user to select content to play.

Administrators have the addition options to delete and add media.

In limited testing it has worked

Specifications

Pep Band Scheduler

The scheduler helps both pep-band and administrators deal with attendance of pep-band games.

The game page displays data related to a specific game, such as the Game ID, Location, and Opponent, among others.

The attendance area on the lower half of the page will display differently for each user. If you are a member of the pep-band you will see an attendance list of all people attending the game from your section, as well as a button to 'Register' or 'Unregister' which will remove the users name from the attendance sheet.

Original Proposed Time Line

Site built using Visual Studio Database created using SQL Server Site Hosted using IIS DNS provided by dyndns.com Windows Communication Foundation to put

database and site together

How it should work

WCF wont work, so nothing can converse between site and DB

Therefore, cannot stream media, populate tables, log in, or transfer information for FileMaker.

Solution?

The Problem

Internet Information Services◦ Microsoft’s web server, second in popularity to

Apache Dyndns.com

◦ Free dns hosting

Web Hosting

Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Easy to use, free via MSDN

Database Hosting

Visual Studio 2008 SP2 used for primary development (using C#)

Microsoft Expression Blend 4 for visually editing the xaml pages

.Net Reflector to edit the dll’s for specific functionality

Building the site

Building the site (cont)

Data Access (Above)Edit account (Left)

Expression Blend

Encryption of the data was very important aspect of our project.

If this was to be used at all encryption is a must. Lots of personal information is stored on our databases.

Combination of data encryption and server-based Our final encryption algorithm is based on a set

of multiple keys which XOR their values with the information.

Decryption XORs the information with the keys in reverse order to retrieve the data.

Security/Encryption

Our algorithm was not over complex in order to save time when interacting with the database.

Our first problem came when dealing with how the server received the incoming information.

It would parse the information with headers to distinguish different types. This conflicted when we would encrypt the data, and it would then get lost in the database.

Security/Encryption

We eventually were crafty with how we encrypted the data, and had to change the way the server managed it, but we got it working.

This problem did set us back slightly.

Also uses IIS-based authentication to confirm usability

Security

FileMaker Integration step was to implement the FileMaker program into the IMS.

It is a clean way of handling displays for a file system.

It is highly customizable and neat.

FileMaker Integration

It originally seemed very straightforward and good way to clean up our GUI.

Unfortunately the more we tried to implement it, the more daunting of a task it become.

The problem came with how the IMS was originally designed. It is not designed well for change at all, so full implementation

If we were to directly implement FileMaker we would need to redesign much of the project.

Did start to implement a simple function to output the chosen information for the user to save, but did not have time to complete.

FileMaker Integration

Good choice for project, since allowed to learn and work with a number of interesting technologies

Design is simple, but setup is complicated Most parts worked well together, but WCF

not working doomed the rest

Reflections