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Library Management System

Posted Date: Total Responses: 0 Posted By: Tony John Member Level: Diamond Points/Cash: 0

We will design - you develop it

This project is different from the other projects we have listed in this site. We want you to do the project yourself this time. We will provide you the architecture and design of the project. You have to follow the guidelines and do the development yourself. We believe this is the best training we can provide you.

Languages

Since you are doing the development yourself, you can choose development language which is most
comfortable for you. C# or VB.NET will equally fit for this project. You can choose MS Access or SQL Server as the database backend.

Project Requirement study and documentation

Let us start with the requirement stage of the project. This is a very critical stage for developing any project. The first step for a developer in any project is to understand the requirements. Communication with customer is very important in this stage. You must communicate with customer as much as possible and document all requirements.

It is strongly reccommdended to have a direct, in person communication with the customer to get a feel of his expectations. Some customers may have lot of suggestions, some of them don't even really know what they want. Some customers may simply say 'I want a Library Management System', but they may not even know what kind of features they want in the product. In such cases, you must be able to suggest the features to the customer and let them understand those features before you develop it.

Some customers may come up with really stupid ideas. They want to do everything by the computer. It is very critical to make them clearly understand what can be done by the computer and what is not. Some tasks may be very easy for a human to do, but very difficult for a computer. You should not promise a customer something that a computer cannot perform progrmmatically.

Some customers may be too smart. They will tell you exactly what they want. And your job would be easier in this case.

In all cases, the most important thing is documenting all requirements and getting approval by the customer.

Talk to the customer about requirements

Document all requirements in a piece of paper or in a word document

Send the requirements document to the customer for his review

Revise the document based on the customer review and suggestions

Get the final approval and signature of the customer on the Requirements Specification

Library Management System requirements

Let us define the requirements for our Library Management System (LMS):

Requirements

This software will allow members to register

Only registered members will be allowed to lend an item from the system

User can add items (Books, CD etc) to the system

System will allow searching for items in the system based on Author name, book name, user name etc

Non requirements

System will not enforce any security. Anybody who have access to the computer will be able to access this software and perform any operations. There will be no login/password required to access this software.

System will not generate any alerts if a member is not returning any items

System will not maintain any inventory.

System doesn't keep track of damaged items. Users have to manually replace the damaged items
with new ones.

System will not handle data security and backup. Users have depend on some external or manual backup mechanism to take data backup whenever required.

Design phase

After completing the requirement study and documentation, it is time to design the software
based on the requirements. It is easy to start coding without any design and you may end up
developing a product which your customer like. But it may not be easy to maintain. Customers
may keep changing their mind. Only after seeing the product, they may say 'we want this
to behave in a different way'. And it is very hard to say 'NO' to a customer.

First step is identifying all the features you are going to implement in the software. The
requirements document is a good guide in identifying the features. According to the requirements
specification, we need to develop the following features in the system:

Registration

Item Management

Lending

Search for Books

Search for Members

Registration

This feature allows to add/edit/delete members in the system. We should be able to store
atleast the basic information like Name, Address, Email etc of the member. You can add more
attributes like phone number, homepage, date of registration etc.

Database structure:

Table Name : Users
Table Schema
Id : Number

Name : String (50)

Address : String (100)

Email : String (50)

DateOfRegistration : DateTime

We have defined 4 fields in the table above. You can add more fields.

When you design a windors form, you have to create text box controls to capture the above fields.
You don't need to create textboxes to catpure some fields like Id, DateOfRegistration etc. Id can
be an auto generated number (MS Access has an AutoNumber field type. SQL Server provides an identity
column. These number will be automatically generated when you insert a record. You don't need
insert these numbers to the database). Also, the DateOfRegistration can be the current date which
you can be programmatically added to the database instead of getting this from the user.

So, in this case, you need to capture only name, Address and Email from the user. See a sample page below :

When you save it, you have to save the name, address, email and current date into the system.
The Id field will be automatically added to the table if you have set it as 'AutoNumber' or
'Identity' column.

If you add more fields to the table (like phone number etc) you must provide appropriate controls
to capture those information.

Item Management

Before we let a user to lend a book from the library, we need to keep the list of items available in the
library. We will develop a feature to add/edit/delete items in the library.

An item (Book, CD etc) in the library can have the following properties:

1. Name

2. Author

3. Total number of books (we may have more than one copy of the same book)

Let us define database schema for this:

Id : Number (Autonumber)

Name : String

Count : Number

You may add more fields like Publisher Name, Book Category etc.

Here is a sample screen shot:

Lending

This feature includes the following:

Allow a member to take a book from library

Return a book to the library

We need the following fields:

Id : Autonumber

BookId : Number - This is the ID of the book

UserId : Number - Id of the member who lend the book

DateOfLend : DateTime

DateOfReturn : DateTime

- this field will filled only at the time of return

This is an important feature and bit more complex than other features we have discussed above. When a user take the book, we will store the Id of the book and Id of the member in the above table. Note that we are not storing the name of the book and name of user. We are just storing the Ids.

It is important to save the exact Book Id and member Id when lending the book. It is a good idea to make those two fields readonly so that user don't need to type them (they might make mistakes if they type the id number). You can provide a feature to search for the books and member. User can search and find the book and member. Once they find in the search screen, user can just select it from the list. When they select a book or member from the search results, you can programmatically populate the Book Id and Member Id fields.

The search buttons for Book Id and member Id should open another window where user can search for Books and Members and select one.When selected in the search window, the selected Id should be populated in this form.

Search for Books

User should be able to search for books by Book Name, author name etc. The results can be displayed using a datagrid. user must be able to select a record from the search results.

Sample screen :

This form will be called from other screens like Lending screen etc. User can search by Book name of author name. The search results will be displayed in the datagrid below. From the datagrid, user can select a record and press the 'select' button. When a record is 'selected', this form should be closed and the selected Books Id should be populated in the appropriate field in the calling form (like lending form).

You can design a similar screen to search for members.
We will add more information here later...

Project Feedbacks

Author: sikkanthar

Member Level: Bronze