Optimized University students and courses information system Текст научной статьи по специальности «Компьютерные и информационные науки»

Научни трудове на Съюза на учените в България-Пловдив, серия Б. Естествени и хуманитарни науки, т. XVIII, ISSN 1311-9192 (Print), ISSN 2534-9376 (On-line), 2018. Scientific researches of the Union of Scientists in Bulgaria-Plovdiv, series B. Natural Sciences and the Humanities, Vol. XVIII, ISSN 1311-9192 (Print), ISSN 2534-9376 (On-line), 2018.

OPTIMIZED UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AND COURSES INFORMATION SYSTEM Festim Kamberi

Faculty of Engineering, International Balkan University, Skopje,

Macedonia

Abstract: An organized and systematic office solution is essential for every institution and corporation. There are many departmental offices that need to maintain and organize their information in a database in any institution. For example, in a university all these departmental offices record various information regarding students such as, their names, IDs, addresses, emails and exam records. Moreover, the information maintained at different departmental offices is shared, and hence, the traditional file distribution approach is not usually efficient. Therefore, they need to be automated and centralized, as information from one module will be needed by other modules, using the database system approach. For example, when a student need his/her registered course, the staff of student affairs office need to check many details about the student like his/her name, id number, year of study, courses attended and many other details that could be maintained and updated by other departmental offices. On the other hand, using a Student Information System application, as an interface to the database, students will find their registered courses, attendance, exams, exam results and many other details more efficiently. Also, instructors will have the chance to prepare exam result reports much quicker, by choosing the course for which they want to make that report. In general, this paper work aims to enhance efficiency and at the same time maintain information accurately. Later in this report, features and improvement that allow achievement of these goals will be demonstrated and emphasized.

Keywords:Database, Graphical User Interface (GUI), Information System. l.Introduction

The information systems are particularly important for organizing data and extracting information in any institution or corporation. The system is usually providing a very helpful task that will replace the human as to keep it in files as the inventory or other purposes. This system is focused on recording, updating and deleting the data regarding the staff of an institution, such as Faculty Staff, Students, and so on. Information and furthermore knowledge can be extracted as reports or printed documents using forms. This Database Management System (DBMS) is based on the forms oriented, which were already been used by the International Balkan University staff before. The main focus is to make it helpful and a friendly user system to student and lecturers in order to allow managing the student information. Therefore, this student information system is divided into three parts, that is, administrator's (Staff) part, instructor's part and student's part. The main advantage of student information system consists on existence of different user friendly

forms used to enter, extract and print out the information from the database, which results in time saving and reducing a delay process in surfing when certain information is required. 2. Methodology

This project methodology is needed to make sure the project that consists of software development will be developed systematically in order to acquire a better result. The overall of the project methodology is shown as figure below.

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The methodology is divided to five main components which are literature review, database design, creating a Graphical User Interface (GUI), generating PDF files using Java programming language, and finally is the software testing.

2.1. Literature Review

The project begins with literature review where the overview of the project needs to be known. The literature review is done by finding out number of lectures student and class provided, involved for Faculty of Engineering (FENG), how many class and how many lectures contribute to this faculty.

2.2. Database Design

The information needed for the Student Information System includes the number of instructors, students and courses for each department and for each faculty. All these and other information need to be known a priory in order for the software to arrange the data in the database. A database is required to store and organize all the data. Hence, the first step in this study was to create a database. Database is a body of information made up of related pieces of data organized so that they can be easily manipulated by a software, such as, the Database Management System. An

important aspect of relational database design is to create relationships between tables, in contrast to traditional file storage system where all the data are stored into one place.

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2.3.Create the suitable GUI

NetBeans IDE is a free, open source, integrated development environment (IDE) that enables to develop, mobile and web applications. The IDE supports application development in various language, including Java.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a way to interact with a computer using pictures and other visual elements displayed on a computer screen. The layouts which include toolboxes such as textboxes, buttons, labels etc., are used to control the information flow. GUI is important to create a friendly user interface between the human and computer in order to understand the data stored in database. In order to make the GUI function, in this study, Java programming language is used as computer programming language.

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2.4. Generate PDF File using Java

One of the key features of the project is to generate PDF Reports (Midterm Exam Results Report, Final Exam Results Report, Make Up Exam Results Report and Course/Exam Schedule Report). This is useful for saving valuable time and reduces the huge paper work. In order to make this real, there are different approaches to use. One of the approaches is iText Java Library. Nowadays, iText is the world's leading F/OSS (free and open source software) PDF library. This library makes it possible for the users to enhance applications with dynamic PDF solutions.

2.5. Software Testing

Software testing is the process used to measure the quality of the developed computer software, mainly, to determine that the software meets its requirements. The testing process of a program is also intended to find any syntactical or logical errors and fix any bugs that may exists. As a result of software testing we will show the Final Exam and Success Points PDF form (see Figure 4), Course Schedule PDF form (see Figure 5) and Exam Schedule PDF form (see Figure 6).

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3. Data Flow Diagram (DFD)

The Data Flow Diagram (DFD) is a graphical representation of the "flow" of Student Information System. A data flow diagram can also be used for the visualization of Data Processing. DFD shows the interaction between the system and outside entities. A DFD represents flow of data through a system. The detailed flow graph is shown in Figure 7. The design of student information system includes DBMS, which is the software providing a way connecting the user to the database.

Figure 7. Detailed flow graph

4. Application Modules

This section describes various functions of the project created in this study. The actual design of the various modules of Student Information System are shown in this section, which takes care of various functionalities that this project aims.

4.1. Home Module

Similarly, to the homepage or home module, the Student Information System application is a Login module (as shown in Figure 8). The purpose of this module is to provide an access to the system. Based on the type of login, the user is provided with various facilities and functionalities. In our application this module provides three types of logins, namely, Administrator login, Instructor login and Student login.

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Figure 8. Student Information Login View

4.2. Administrator Module

In this module when the administrator will enter the email and password, then he/she will have access to the administrator page which consists of six sub modules listed in the following (as shown in Figure 9).

Figure 9. Detailed Flow Diagram of Administrator Role

4.2.1. Course and Exam Schedule

The problem is to design and implement an algorithm to create a semester course time table by assigning time-slots and rooms to a given set of courses for each semester under certain constraints. The constraints include avoiding clashes of time-slots and rooms, assigning appropriate rooms and appropriate number of slots and contact hours to the courses and so on. The lecture-timetable scheduling is a constraint satisfaction problem for which an optimal solution has been found in this work that satisfies a given set of constraints. The college lecture-timetabling problem usually requires to find some time slots and classrooms which satisfy a certain constraints imposed on some courses, instructors, classrooms and so on. Therefore, the variables to be instantiated are time slots and classrooms of offered courses.

4.3. Instructor Module

In this module when a user enters the valid email and password, then all the following pages can be visited (as shown in Figure 10).

Figure 10. Detailed Flow Diagram of Instructor Role

4.4. Student Module

In this module when a user enters a valid email and password, then all the following pages can be visited (as shown in Figure 11).

Figure 11. Detailed Flow Diagram of Student Role

5. Traditional File System vs. DBMS

There are number of characteristics that differs from traditional file management system. In file system approach, each user defines and implements the needed files for a specific application to run. For example, in sales department of an enterprise, one user will be maintaining the details of how many sales personnel are there in the sales department and their working hours, these details will be stored and maintained in the separate files. Another user will be maintaining the salesperson salary details working in the concern, the detailed salary report will be stored and maintaining in a separate file. Although both of the users are interested in the files of the salespersons they will be having their details in the separate files and they need different programs to manipulate their files. This will lead to wastage of space and redundancy or replication of data's, which may lead to confusion, sharing of data among various users is not possible, data inconsistency may occur, and other issues related to security during the data transfer. These files will not be having any inter-relationship among the data's stored in these files. Therefore, in

traditional file processing every user will be defining their own constraints and implement the files needed for the applications.

In database approach, a single repository of data is maintained that is defined once and then accessed by many users using the so-called database management system. The fundamental characteristic of database approach is that the database system not only contains data's, but it also contains complete definition or description of the database structure and constraints. These definitions are stored in a system catalog, which contains the information about the structure and definitions of the database.

6. Conclusion

In this project, I presented a DBMS software for the Student Information System database at International Balkan University. The main goal of the system consists on helping the Student Information System database to work systematically and allowing the users to manage student information in a database, I hope and believe that this system will give a better performance in arranging the instructor and student information in an automated way, avoiding thus doing it manually. This system will help faculty staff to arrange student information and course faster and easier.

7. References

[1] Abramson, D., (1991) Constructing school timetables using simulated annealing sequential and parallel algorithms. Management Science, Vol.37. no.1, p.98-113

[2] Gupta, S (2012) Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide.2nd edition. Packt Publishing Ltd. Birmingham.

[3] "GNU Affero General Public License- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation". Gnu.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 31 May 2017.

[4]Liang, D (2015) Introduction to Java Programming. 10th edition. Armstrong Atlantic State University

[5] Lowagie, B (2011) iText in Action. 2nd edition. Manning Publications Co. Stamford.