Overview

My team and I were tasked with enhancing AddressBook3 - a CLI (Command Line Interface) application into a better product. We decided to morph the application into the Njoy Teaching Assistant, to improve the quality of life for teachers by simplifying mundane administrative tasks. In particular, the application enables teachers to maintain student records to manage students better; set questions and quizzes to enhance students learning; and keep track of their schedules with an interactive timetable.
This is what our project looks like:

Ui
Figure 1. The graphical user interface for Njoy.

My role was to design and write code for teachers to better plan and manage events in their schedule. The rest of the sections will cover the summary of my contributions to the codebase, the user guide and the developer guide.

The following are icons and symbols that I will be using for the Project Portfolio:

This indicates a component, class or object in the architecture of the application.

This indicates important text.

Summary of contributions

This section summarizes my specific enhancements, code contributions and other helpful increments towards the Njoy Teaching Assistant.

I implemented the commands related to the event feature, which include:

Event Creation and Deletion

  • What it does: Users can create and delete events to keep track of their schedule. These events are created by specifying the event name, start and end date time. These events also can be set to recur weekly or daily, reducing the hassle for creating repeated events. Events can also have their own colors to allow users to easily identify and categorize their events. Users can also delete any events which they have mistakenly created, using the delete event command.

  • Justification: Teachers usually have numerous activities and events to attend. These include delivering lectures, meeting with parents, consultations, etc. I wanted to create a feature which allows teachers to easily manage their time, not just during the office hours, but also to schedule errands and other preparation work.

  • Highlights: Challenging portions of this feature include: ensuring there were no duplicate events created as well as implementing the recurring events feature.

Event Editing

  • What it does: Users can edit events that are currently in their calendar.

  • Justification: There is a possibility that events have to be rescheduled in the calendar, and this functionality allows teachers to do exactly that. In fact, teachers are allowed to edit any of the fields in an event including its color and recurrence type.

Event Viewing

  • What it does: Users can view their events in calendar form and set the target date of interest as well as the viewing mode of the calendar (weekly or daily).

  • Justification: Teachers may want to view the calendar in different forms, for different purposes. They might want to have a over-arching view of the upcoming events of the week, thus they may wish to view their events in a weekly form. They may also wish to go into the details of a specific day when making appointments with students and other teachers.

  • Highlights: This feature remembers the preferences of the user in the same instance of the application. For example, after switching to the student list and switching back to the calendar, it remembers the target date of interest as well as the viewing mode (weekly or daily), and renders it accordingly.

Event Screenshot

  • What it does: Users can take a screenshot of the calendar and save it to a png file.

  • Justification: Teachers may want to share their weekly schedule or simply have a image of their events to be viewed on their mobile devices. This feature allows them to do exactly that by taking a screenshot of whichever date and time the user is currently viewing and saving it into a png file.

  • Highlights: The implementation of this feature was rather challenging, as different users have different screen sizes, and taking a screenshot may not capture all the information desired by the user. As such, the screenshot feature, actually opens the calendar into full-screen mode before taking the screenshot. This is a "best-effort" approach to capture as much detail as possible within the confines of the user’s display.

Event Export

  • What it does: Users can export all their events into a ics file.

  • Justification: Teachers may want manage their events simultaneously in other calendar applications such as Google Calendar. Note that most calendar applications accept ics file types as imports.

  • Highlights: The implementation of this feature was rather challenging, as every event had to be converted into a ics-compliant format, which represents all its information including the recurrence type.

Code contributed

Please click the following link to see my code contributions dashboard. Code Report

Other contributions

  • Project management:

    • Managed milestones and deadlines on Github.

    • Removed legacy AddressBook3 code #207

    • Resolved the issues found by others related to my feature on Github: #176

  • Enhancements to existing features:

    • Wrote additional tests for existing features and storage manager to increase over 14% in test coverage: #188, #210

    • Wrote skeleton code for storage for others to reuse: #35

  • Community:

    • Team pull requests that I reviewed and merged: [Github]

  • Documentation:

    • Added documentation for features added: #188

    • Improved formatting and added figure number to the existing contents of the User Guide: #195

    • Made relevant changes for the Developer Guide: #188

  • Tools:

    • Integrated a third party library (iCalendarAgenda) to the project (#79)

Contributions to the User Guide

Given below are sections I contributed to the User Guide. They showcase my ability to write documentation targeting end-users. The following are specific portions of the NJoy Assistant’s User Guide that I have selected. I’ll only show one example of creation, editing and display for the features that I have created, as they are repetitive.

The following is an example of Event screenshot section the User Guide:

Taking screenshot of schedule

Takes a screen shot of the calendar as PNG file
Format: event screenshot

Scroll to which portion of the calendar is to be taken, and the application will then open a separate full screen window to maximise the content captured of the screenshot.
The event schedule screenshot is stored in the printable directory which is in the same directory as the NJoy assistant. If the directory exists beforehand, no new directory is created. See finding schedule screenshot.
The screenshot will be saved based on the current settings of your event schedule. For example if you are viewing 2019-11-23 on a weekly mode, the file name will be saved as WEEKLY_2019-11-23. NJoy will also overwrite any screenshots from the past with the same event name, to ensure that the screenshot in the printable directory is the most updated.

  • Example: event screenshot
    Takes a screenshot of the current calendar and saves it into Printable folder.

The following example demonstrates how to find the screenshot:

Step 1. After executing the event screenshot command, the user should navigate to their current directory. An printable folder as shown in the image below should be created!

EventPrintableLocation
Figure 2. Event screenshot Location

 
Step 2. The png file will be named according to your schedule settings in the format VIEWMODE_TARGETDATE.png

EventScreenshotFile
Figure 3. Event screenshot file

 
Step 3. Now you can share your calendar screenshot with others (or yourself)!

EventScreenshotSample
Figure 4. Sample event screenshot

The following is an example of Event view section the User Guide:

Viewing all events

Show all your events in the calendar. All fields are optional
Format: event view scheduleMode/…​ targetDate/…​

The options supported by this feature includes:

  1. scheduleMode - Schedule viewing mode of the calendar. Either weekly or daily.

  2. targetDate - The target date to show for the week. If in daily mode, simply show the events in the date. If in weekly mode, show the week which includes the specified date

    The target date option must be specified in the following format: yyyy-mm-dd. E.g. 2019-11-23

Example:

  • event view scheduleMode/daily targetDate/2019-11-07
    Opens the calendar view in daily mode with the target date 7 November 2019.

EventViewDailyMode
Figure 5. Viewing the calendar in daily mode with target date 7 November 2019

Contributions to the Developer Guide

Given below are sections I contributed to the Developer Guide. They showcase my ability to write technical documentation and the technical depth of my contributions to the project. Again, I’m only going to include the most relevant portions of the guide, especially the UML diagrams that I have created. Also, some of the command hyperlinks will obviously not work because I have omitted them for brevity.

The following is the EventRecord class overview section of the Developer Guide:

Class Overview

The figure below describes the interactions between event-related classes in the Model. Note how the EventRecord class has a dependency on Event object in its constructor, but only has a VEvent attribute: vEvents. This highlights a mapping between the Event and VEvent object within the EventRecord class. Althought the methods of the EventRecord class are omitted for brevity, they are mostly VEvent based, which again highlights that interactions with the Logic and UI components will mostly be done in VEvent type.

EventClassDiagram
Figure 6. Class Diagram for EventRecord and its related classes

The following is the delete Event section of the Developer Guide:

Delete event command

Implementation

The following is a detailed explanation of the operations EventDeleteCommand performs.

  1. The EventDeleteCommand#execute(Model model) method is executed and it validates that the specified Index to delete is within range. If valid, the vEvent to be deleted will be retrieved using its Index.

  2. The method Model#deleteVEvent(Index index) will then be called to remove the VEvent from the EventRecord. EventRecord#deleteVEvent(Index index) is invoked which makes a call to its internal list to remove the speficied vEvent.

  3. If successful, a success message will be generated by the and a new CommandResult will be returned with the generated success message. Otherwise, an error message showing proper note command syntax is thrown as CommandException.

  4. If the command syntax was valid and VEvent was removed from the EventRecord, LogicManager calls Storage#saveEventRecord(ReadOnlyEventRecord eventRecord) which saves the new notes record in JSON format after serializing it using the JsonEventRecord.

The following is a sample sequence diagram of the EventDeleteCommand. Other commands under the notes feature follow a similar program flow; their diagrams have been omitted for brevity.

EventDeleteSequenceDiagram
Figure 7. Sequence Diagram for Deleting Events

The following is the index Event section of the Developer Guide:

Index command

The following is a detailed explanation of the operations EventIndexCommand performs. The purpose of this command is to return the index of the vEvent(s) with event name that equals to the desiredEventName which is input from the user. And if there are no matching VEvents with the same event name. Suggest a VEvent with the most similar event name to that of the desiredEventName based on the Levenshtein distance formula

The following is a sample activity diagram of the execute method of EventIndexCommand. Note that the "details" in the diagram refers to the VEvent object itself and its corresponding index.

EventIndexActivityDiagram
Figure 8. Activity Diagram for finding index of Event
Implementation

  1. The EventIndexCommand#execute(Model model) method is executed.

  2. The method EventRecord#findVEvents(String desiredEventName) is then called through the Model#findVEvents(String desiredEventName) method.

  3. The EventRecord#vEvents list is iterated once and the search is performed on the 'desiredEventName' using StringUtil#equalsIgnoreCase with the summary value of each VEvent. Matching VEvent’s and their corresponding index in `vEvents will form a new Pair<Index, VEvent> and be added to the resultIndexList. At the end of the iteration resultIndexList is returned.

  4. If the resultIndexList returned is not empty, a new CommandResult will be returned with a message stating the Index and the corresponding details of the VEvents found.

  5. Else, when the resultIndexList is empty, the method EventRecord#findMostSimilarVEvent(String desiredEventName) is then called through the Model#findMostSimilarVEvent(String desiredEventName) method.

  6. If the there are no VEvent, in vEvents of EventRecord the method will throw a VEventNotFoundException which will be caught. This exception will then be wrapped to a CommandException and thrown upwards with a corresponding user message to be shown.

  7. Otherwise, EventRecord#vEvents will be iterated once, and the similarity between desiredEventName and the summary value of each VEvent will be calculated based on the Levenshtein distance formula. At the end the event which is most similar and its index will create be returned as a new Pair<Index, VEvent>.

  8. A new CommandResult will be returned with a message stating the Index and the corresponding details of the most similar VEvent found.

VEvent objects use a summary object to represent the name of an event.