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COMP 3023 Software Development with C++ - Assignment SP5 2018 Page 1 of 5
School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences
COMP 3023 Software Development with C++
Individual Project
Networked Asset Manager
Introduction
This document describes the Individual variant of the Networked Asset Manager Group Project in response to the
issues around group organisation. Each group may choose to continue the Group Project with the alterations
described in the accompanying Group Project Amendment document. Alternatively, your group may disband and
each student may work on the Individual project instead. You will need to refer to the original specification for
the bulk of the requirements, this document contains only the changes over the original specification.
If any parts of this specification appear unclear, please ensure you seek clarification.
Networking
There is no need to complete a networking component for the Group Project. That is, the following sections (and
their subsections) of the original document can be disregarded:
• Networking
• Messages
Therefore, the following classes do not have to be implemented nor included in the design (UML diagram) and
any existing version of them can be ignored or deleted:
• NetworkedAssetRegister
• NetworkManager
• MessageFactory
• PlainTextMessageFactory
• Message
• RequestMessage
• ResponseMessage
Assets and their Properties
To reduce the scope of the application, the AssetType class will be removed. All references to AssetType from
the original Group Project can be disregarded and the class does not have to be implemented nor appear in the
design (UML diagram). This requires some rearrangement of the core structure as UserPropertyDefinitions
will no longer be present on the AssetType. The new structure is illustrated below.
The consequences of this change are as follows:
• There is only one instance of the Type-Object pattern (UserPropertyDefinition/UserProperty).
• When a UserProperty is destroyed its associated UserPropertyDefinition must also be destroyed
unless it is still referenced by another UserProperty (which may occur when as Asset it cloned).
• There is no need to create user interfaces for AssetType, i.e., no AssetTypes List View, no AssetType
Details View, etc.
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• The user needs to be able copy an existing Asset so that they do not have to re-add the same user
properties over and over. See section GUI Changes below.
• When updating a UserPropertyDefinition, it must only change for the current Asset. This can be
achieved by simply creating a new UserPropertyDefinition and replace the existing one. Other
UserProperties referencing the old UserPropertyDefinition must remain unaffected.
GUI Changes
The following views are not required:
• View Asset Types
• View/Edit Asset Types
Additionally, the Main Menu/Dashboard does not need to provide access to the removed views.
As AssetTypes are not included in this variant of the project the cloning of an Asset cannot be performed by an
AssetType. Therefore, the user must be able to copy an Asset (i.e., clone it) to simplify the creation of new
Assets with existing sets of properties and values. This functionality must be available from the Asset Details
View and the Assets List View. Selecting the copy option must take the user to the editable details of the new
Asset object, which will only be stored in the register if the user confirms the edit.
When specifying the UserProperties of Assets, the user must be presented with selections for the type,
precision, and validators (minimum, maximum, and enumeration) of the property, which will be stored in the
UserProperty’s associated definition.
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To support saving the register content to file, the Login Screen must contain a field to specify the file to load. The
user must be able to select the file location through a File selection dialog. After the singleton AssetRegister
instance has been retrieved, the specified file will be loaded into the register.
When the application is closed, the user must be prompted (Yes/No) to save the database. If the user selects ‘Yes’
a File selection dialog will be displayed for the user to select the location and name of the file.
Optional: the file from which the entities were loaded may be kept in memory to facilitate quick saving (i.e., set
the initial value of the File selection dialog) to the same file at application close.
Optional: the user may be able to periodically save the stored entities to file without exiting the application.
Storing Assets to File
In lieu of the networking component, the Asset Manager must be able to store its database of Assets,
Custodians, and MaintenanceRecords to file when the application closes and load the file at application start-
up. The file format will be a simple, plain-text format (described below) and all entities will be stored in a single
file. To ensure correct resolution of dependent entities, the entities must be stored in the following order:
• Custodians
• Assets
• MaintenanceRecords
File Format
The following describes the data format of the offline storage file. It requires that the objects be serialised into a
plain-text format and be deserialised on application load. You must determine an appropriate method of
serialisation and deserialization: for example, you may use QTextStream and overloaded input/output operators
(>> and |||||
Where fields in angle brackets denote attributes of Custodian, with special instructions included after a colon ‘:’.
For example, indicates that the name attribute should be percent encoded and written in that position.
The instruction, ‘iso8601’ instruction for date/time data fields indicates it should be serialised in ISO 8601 format
(see QDateTime::toString and QDateTime::fromString).
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For example, an instance of Custodian may be serialised as:
Custodian|cust001|matt|2018-09-14T00:00:00+09:30|Johnny|Maintenance|0880001111
Asset
The data format for Assets is as follows (ignore line breaks in the specification, serialisation is one entity per
line):
Asset|||||||
||[disposalDate:iso8601]||
[|]
If properties.size() is zero (‘0’), no UserProperty will be output and there will be no trailing pipe ‘|’ symbol.
Each UserProperty is serialised as:
=|[|precision=]|min=,max=,enum=
Where is the precision (number of decimal places) of a double and is only present if the type is
‘double’ (the square brackets indicate that the entire field is optional and should only be present if a precision
value is specified), is the value of the minimum value validator if present (otherwise empty),
is the value of the maximum value validator, and is a colon separated list of the
enumeration values (percent encoded). The type, precision, min, max, and enum values come from the
UserPropertyDefinition associated with the UserProperty. For example,
Asset|asset001|matt|2018-09-14T00:00:00+09:30|x23-zz0|ACME%20Co.|x23series%20Pump|100.22|
2018-09-14T00:00:00+09:30||cust001|1|flow=2.5|double|min=,max=,enum=1.0:2.5
Asset|asset002|matt|2018-09-14T00:00:00+09:30|P-101|Pumps%27R%27Us||50.00|
2018-09-14T00:00:00+09:30|2018-09-15T00:00:00+09:30|cust001|0
Asset|asset003|matt|2018-09-14T00:00:00+09:30|Pump3|Pumps%27R%27Us|x23series|50.00|2018-09-
14T00:00:00+09:30|2018-09-15T00:00:00+09:30|cust001|1|flow=2.50|precision=2|min=,max=,enum=
Note: %27 is an apostrophe ‘ character
Note: the blank line separates distinct entities for readability, it should not occur in an output file.
Note: When percent encoding the enumeration values, do not percent encode the colon separators. This allows
the values themselves to contain colons (as they will be percent encoded) while maintaining the separator (which
will not be encoded).
MaintenanceRecord
MaintenanceRecords are serialised as follows (ignore line breaks in the specification, serialisation is one entity
per line):
MaintenancRecord|||||
||
For example:
MaintenanceRecord|rec001|matt|2018-09-14T00:00:00+09:30|asset001|
2018-09-20T00:00:00+09:30|maintenance guy 01|Inspection
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Submission Details
You must submit a single ZIP archive file containing the following:
• UML diagram (in PDF or PNG format)
• Your Qt Creator project folder including all source files required to compile and run your application, your
Doxygen config file, and the version control directory (i.e., the ‘.git’ folder)
The submitted ZIP file must not include any generated files, such as object files and executables, or extraneous
files, such as the ‘*.pro.user’ file.
Once you have created the zip file according to the specifications, you are required to upload it to the Assessment
Item 3: Project submission via LearnOnline. The deadline for submission is 2 November 2018 11:59 PM. After
which time the submission will be considered late and attract a penalty as detailed in the course outline.