SoCompiler Developer Guide

SoCompiler is a desktop app for managing contacts and module information, optimized for use via a Command Line Interface (CLI) while still having the benefits of a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is built specifically for School of Computing (SOC) students in NUS but can also be used by other students from NUS.

This developer guide will expose the architecture behind SoCompiler and showcase the specifics of how commands are handled by the application.

In order to be a successful SoCompiler Developer, you need a general understanding of:

• Java language
• JavaFx

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started
2. Design
   1. Architecture
   2. UI Component
   3. Logic Component
   4. Model Component
   5. Storage Component
   6. Common Classes
3. Implementation
   1. Module Class
   2. Add Module Feature
   3. Delete Module Feature
   4. Find Module Feature
4. Documentation, Logging, Testing, Configuration and Dev-Ops
5. Acknowledgements: Requirements
6. Appendix A: Requirements
   1. Product Scope
   2. User Stories
   3. Use Cases
   4. Non-Functional Requirements
   5. Glossary
7. Appendix B: Instructions for Manual Testing
   1. Launch and Shutdown
   2. Deleting a Person
   3. Saving Data

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1. Getting started

Refer to the guide Setting up and getting started.

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2. Design

SoCompiler aims to provide features that are intuitive and simple to use. Keeping this in mind, we pursed an iterative approach, adding new features amidst evolving requirements. This gives rise to the following main guiding principles for SoCompiler:

Maintainability

This project is built upon an application called AddressBook Level 3 (AB3), which follows the Model View Controller(MVC) design pattern. Ab3 was developed in a manner that facilitates easy modification. We capitalised on this fact and built upon existing components in AB3, such as UI, Logic, Model and Storage.

Command Line Interface (CLI) Oriented

As our target audience is SOC students who usually type fast and are familiar with command line interfaces, we designed SoCompiler to be more efficient at managing contacts and module information using commands compared to other apps in the market.

2.1. Architecture

The Architecture Diagram given above explains the high-level design of the App.

Given below is a quick overview of main components and how they interact with each other.

Main components of the architecture

Main has two classes called Main and MainApp. It is responsible for,

• At app launch: Initializes the components in the correct sequence, and connects them up with each other.
• At shut down: Shuts down the components and invokes cleanup methods where necessary.

Commons represents a collection of classes used by multiple other components.

The rest of the App consists of four components.

• UI: The User Interface (UI) of the App.
• Logic: The command executor.
• Model: Holds the data of the App in memory.
• Storage: Reads data from, and writes data to, the hard disk.

How the architecture components interact with each other

The Sequence Diagram below shows how the components interact with each other for the scenario where the user issues the command delete 1.

Each of the four main components (also shown in the diagram above),

• defines its Application Programming Interface (API) in an interface with the same name as the Component.
• implements its functionality using a concrete {Component Name}Manager class (which follows the corresponding API interface mentioned in the previous point.

For example, the Logic component defines its API in the Logic.java interface and implements its functionality using the LogicManager.java class which follows the Logic interface. Other components interact with a given component through its interface rather than the concrete class (reason: to prevent outside component’s being coupled to the implementation of a component), as illustrated in the (partial) class diagram below.

The sections below give more details of each component.

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2.2. UI component

API : Ui.java

The UI consists of a MainWindow that is made up of parts e.g.CommandBox, ResultDisplay, PersonListPanel , StatusBarFooter etc. All these, including the MainWindow, inherit from the abstract UiPart class which captures the commonalities between classes that represent parts of the visible GUI.

The UI component uses the JavaFx UI framework. The layout of these UI parts are defined in matching .fxml files that are in the src/main/resources/view folder. For example, the layout of the MainWindow is specified in MainWindow.fxml

The UI component,

• executes user commands using the Logic component.
• listens for changes to Model data so that the UI can be updated with the modified data.
• keeps a reference to the Logic component, because the UI relies on the Logic to execute commands.
• depends on some classes in the Model component, as it displays Person object residing in the Model.

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2.3. Logic component

API : Logic.java

Here’s a (partial) class diagram of the Logic component:

How the Logic component works:

1. When Logic is called upon to execute a command, it uses the AddressBookParser class to parse the user command.
2. This results in a Command object (more precisely, an object of one of its subclasses e.g., AddCommand) which is executed by the LogicManager.
3. The command can communicate with the Model when it is executed (e.g. to add a person).
4. The result of the command execution is encapsulated as a CommandResult object which is returned back from Logic.

The Sequence Diagram below illustrates the interactions within the Logic component for the execute("delete 1") API call.

Here are the other classes in Logic (omitted from the class diagram above) that are used for parsing a user command:

How the parsing works:

• When called upon to parse a user command, the AddressBookParser class creates an XYZCommandParser (XYZ is a placeholder for the specific command name e.g., AddCommandParser) which uses the other classes shown above to parse the user command and create a XYZCommand object (e.g., AddCommand) which the AddressBookParser returns back as a Command object.
• All XYZCommandParser classes (e.g., AddCommandParser, DeleteCommandParser, …) inherit from the Parser interface so that they can be treated similarly where possible e.g, during testing.

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2.4. Model component

API : Model.java

The Model component,

• stores the address book data i.e., all Person or Module objects (which are contained in a UniquePersonList or a UniqueModuleList object respectively).
• stores the currently ‘selected’ Person or Module objects (e.g., results of a search query) as a separate _ filtered_ list which is exposed to outsiders as an unmodifiable ObservableList<Person> or ObservableList<Module> that can be ‘observed’ e.g. the UI can be bound to this list so that the UI automatically updates when the data in the list change.
• stores a UserPref object that represents the user’s preferences. This is exposed to the outside as a ReadOnlyUserPref objects.
• does not depend on any of the other three components (as the Model represents data entities of the domain, they should make sense on their own without depending on other components)

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2.5. Storage component

API : Storage.java

The Storage component,

• can save both address book data and user preference data in json format, and read them back into corresponding objects.
• inherits from both AddressBookStorage and UserPrefStorage, which means it can be treated as either one (if only the functionality of only one is needed).
• depends on some classes in the Model component (because the Storage component’s job is to save/retrieve objects that belong to the Model)

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2.6. Common classes

Classes used by multiple components are in the seedu.addressbook.commons package.

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3. Implementation

This section describes some noteworthy details on how certain features are implemented.

3.1. Module Class

The Module Class facilitates the storing of various information related to a student’s module that he/she is currently taking.

A Module Class contains

• A ModuleCode
• TutorialDetails
• LectureDetails
• A lecture ZoomLink
• A tutorial ZoomLink
• AssignmentDetails

All fields except ModuleCode are optional since not every Module will have details for every field. Empty fields are represented by empty strings. Users can later modify the fields using the EditCommand.

All the commands associated with the Module Class would have the keyword “Module” in their class name. For example, the command to add a Module is referred to as a AddModuleCommand.

All the Module objects are contained in a UniqueModuleList object which ensures that no duplicate Module objects can exist in the UniqueModuleList object. This is because in NUS, there are no two modules with the same module code. Thus, the notion of equality is defined by default to be two Module objects containing the same ModuleCode object.

All the classes contained within the Module Class all have a regex that checks for whether the user input for the specific field is valid.

For the five classes,

• The ModuleCode should only contain alphanumeric characters and spaces, and it should not be blank.
• The ZoomLink should be either blank, or a valid URL.
• AssignmentDetails should not be blank if added.

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3.2. Add Module feature

The AddModule commands extends Command, and takes in a moduleCode, lectureDetails, tutorialDetails, zoomLink and multiple optional assignmentDetails to be added. Additionally, it implements the following operation:

• AddModuleCommand#execute()— Adds the corresponding module to the model.

This operation is exposed in the Model interface as Model#addModule().

Given below is an example usage scenario, and an object diagram to show the objects created during this command.

Step 1. The user launches the application. The ReadOnlyAddressBook will be initialized with the initial address book state.

Step 2. The user executes addm m/CS1101S command to add a module with the corresponding details in the address book.

• The addm command calls AddressBookParser#parseCommand(), which creates a AddModuleCommandParser.
• The AddModuleCommandParser then tokenizes the user input string and returns an ArgumentMultimap object that maps prefixes to their respective argument values.
• Methods in ParserUtil is are then called to parse each individual object obtained from the ArgumentMultimap using their corresponding parsers.
• Then, a new Module with the corresponding details is created.
• After creating the Module, an AddModuleCommand is created, which calls Model#addModule(), and adds the newly created module to the model object.

The following object diagram illustrates the above example:

The following sequence diagram shows how the AddModule operation works:

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3.3. Delete Module feature

The DeleteModule commands extends Command, and takes in an Index to be deleted. Additionally, it implements the following operation:

• DeleteModuleCommand#execute()— Deletes the corresponding item in the given model according to the given index.

This operation is exposed in the Model interface as Model#deleteModule().

Given below is an example usage scenario, and an object diagram to show the objects created during this command.

Step 1. The user launches the application. The ReadOnlyAddressBook will be initialized with the initial address book state.

Step 2. The user executes deletem 1 command to delete the 1st module in the address book.

• The deletem command calls AddressBookParser#parseCommand(), which creates a DeleteModuleCommandParser.
• The DeleteModuleCommandParser gets the Index to be deleted, which is 1 in this case, and creates a DeleteModuleCommand.
• DeleteModuleCommand then calls Model#deleteModule(), and deletes the module from the model object corresponding to the number parsed.

The following object diagram illustrates the above example:

The following sequence diagram shows how the DeleteModule operation works:

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3.4. Find Module feature

The FindModule command extends Command, and takes in an ModuleDetailsContainsKeywordsPredicate to filter the module list by. Additionally, it implements the following operation:

• FindModuleCommand#execute()

This operation is exposed in the Model interface as Model#updateFilteredModuleList().

Given below is an example usage scenario.

Step 1. The user launches the application. The ReadOnlyAddressBook will be initialized with the initial address book state.

Step 2. The user executes findm CS2100 command to filter the module list by CS2100.

• The findm CS2100 command calls AddressBookParser#parseCommand(), which creates a FindModuleCommandParser.
• The FindModuleCommandParser instantiates a ModuleDetailsContainsKeywordsPredicate with the given keyword CS2100.
• The FindModuleCommandParser then creates a FindModuleCommand with the keyword.
• The FindModuleCommand then calls Model#updateFilteredModuleList() and filter the list to contain only Modules with the given keyword in their module code.

The following sequence diagram shows how the FindModule operation works:

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4. Documentation, logging, testing, configuration, dev-ops

• Documentation guide
• Testing guide
• Logging guide
• Configuration guide
• DevOps guide

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5. Acknowledgements

SoCompiler is built-upon AddressBook-Level3, a sample project that serves as a base for Computer Science students to work on.

Credit for code adapted/materials obtained from external sources

• Code to read a file from resources folder is adapted from this thread on mkyong.com
• Font used for the GUI were obtained from Google Fonts, where all fonts are under open source licenses and can be used in commercial and non-commercial products.

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6. Appendix A: Requirements

6.1. Product scope

Target user profile:

• is from SoC
• has a need to manage a significant number of contacts
• has a need to manage the modules they are taking
• prefer desktop apps over other types
• can type fast
• prefers typing to mouse interactions
• is reasonably comfortable using CLI apps

Value proposition: Sole app that SoC students need to streamline their everyday routines

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6.2. User stories

Priorities: High (must have) - * * *, Medium (nice to have) - * *, Low (unlikely to have) - *

Priority	As a …​	I want to …​	So that I can…​
* * *	SoC Student	add a module
* * *	SoC Student	add a new person
* * *	SoC Student	delete a person	remove entries that I no longer need
* * *	SoC Student	delete a module	remove entries that I no longer need
* * *	SoC Student	add zoom links for my modules
* * *	SoC Student	delete zoom links	remove entries that I no longer need
* * *	SoC Student	easily find my zoom links	not spend too much time finding them on various websites
* * *	SoC Student	find a module and the specifics of the module	not spend too much time finding information on various websites
* * *	SoC Student	add the deadline of my assignments for each module	easily keep track of my deadlines
* * *	SoC Student	find a contact easily	not spend too much time looking for contacts
* *	SoC Student	check my schedule for the day	plan ahead
* *	SoC Student	organise consultations easily	not need to search various websites to organise consultations
* *	SoC Student	label my contacts	keep track of my project groups
* *	SoC Student	organise the deadlines of my assignments	see which deadline is most pressing
* *	SoC Student	see the dates of my exams	better prepare for them
*	SoC Student	add miscellaneous events	better plan my time
*	SoC Student	archive the current information	reset for the new semester
*	SoC Student	keep track of my interview dates	make ample preparations
*	SoC Student	keep track of my weekly meetings	make preparations for them
*	Teaching Assistant	access document links for all my slides	share with the class I am teaching
*	Teaching Assistant	manage my student’s consultation slots	easily find the timing for their consultation
*	Teaching Assistant	access my module website	grade my student’s submission
*	Teaching Assistant	easily group my students’ contacts together	easily find them at once

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6.3. Use Cases

(For all use cases below, the System is the SoCompiler and the Actor is the user, unless specified otherwise)

Use case:UC1 Add a person

MSS

1. User requests to add person

2. SoCompiler adds the person to the list of persons

   Use case ends.

Extensions

• 1a. The given person already exists.

  • 1a1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

• 1b. Necessary fields are empty.

  • 1b1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

Use case:UC2 Delete a person

MSS

1. User requests to list persons
2. SoCompiler shows a list of persons
3. User requests to delete a specific person in the list

4. SoCompiler deletes the person

   Use case ends.

Extensions

• 2a. The list is empty.

  Use case ends.

• 3a. The given index is invalid.

  • 3a1. SoCompiler shows an error message.

    Use case resumes at step 2.

Use case:UC3 Add a module

MSS

1. User requests to add a module

2. SoCompiler adds the module to the list of modules

   Use case ends.

Extensions

• 1a. The given module already exists.

  • 1a1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

• 1b. Necessary fields are empty.

  • 1b1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

Use case:UC4 Delete a module

MSS

1. User requests to list module
2. SoCompiler shows a list of modules
3. User requests to delete a specific module in the list

4. SoCompiler deletes the module

   Use case ends.

Extensions

• 2a. The list is empty.

  Use case ends.

• 3a. The given index is invalid.

  • 3a1. SoCompiler shows an error message.

    Use case resumes at step 2.

Use case:UC5 Find a person

MSS

1. User requests to find keyword

2. SoCompiler shows a list of persons matching that keyword

   Use case ends.

Use case:UC6 Find a module

MSS

1. User requests to find keyword

2. SoCompiler shows a list of modules matching that keyword

   Use case ends.

Use case:UC7 Display list of persons

MSS

1. User requests to list persons

2. SoCompiler shows a list of persons

   Use case ends.

Use case:UC8 Display list of modules

MSS

1. User requests to list modules

2. SoCompiler shows a list of modules

   Use case ends.

Use case:UC9 Edit entry in list of persons

MSS

1. User requests to list persons
2. SoCompiler shows a list of persons
3. User requests to edit the fields of a specified person in the list

4. SoCompiler edits the fields of the specified person

   Use case ends.

Extensions

• 3a. The given index is invalid.

  • 3a1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

• 3b. No field is provided.

  • 3b1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

• 3c. The given name already exists.

  • 3c1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

Use case:UC10 Edit entry in list of modules

MSS

1. User requests to list modules
2. SoCompiler shows a list of modules
3. User requests to edit the fields of a specified module in the list

4. SoCompiler edits the fields of the specified module

   Use case ends.

Extensions

• 3a. The given index is invalid.

  • 3a1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

• 3b. No field is provided.

  • 3b1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

• 3c. The given module code already exists.

  • 3c1. SoCompiler shows an error message

    Use case ends.

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6.4. Non-Functional Requirements

1. Should work on any mainstream OS as long as it has Java 11 or above installed.
2. Should be able to hold up to 1000 persons and modules without a noticeable sluggishness in performance for typical usage.
3. A user with more than 50 words per minute typing speed for regular English text (i.e. not code, not system admin commands) should be able to accomplish most of the tasks faster using commands than using the mouse.
4. The system should be backward compatible with data stored in earlier versions of the system.
5. The product is not required to handle interaction with other users.

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6.5. Glossary

Command Line Interface (CLI)

It is an interface where users input text commands to interact with the computer/program.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

It is an interface where users can interact with apps/electrical devices through graphical icons and audio indicators.

School of Computing (SOC)

It refers to the School of Computing from the National University of Singapore.

User Interface

The point of human-computer interaction and communication.

Application Programming Interface

The way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other.

Mainstream OS:

Operating Systems such as Windows, Linux, Unix, OS-X

Modules:

University modules offered in NUS

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7. Appendix B: Instructions for manual testing

Given below are instructions to test the app manually.

7.1. Launch and shutdown

1. Initial launch

   1. Download the jar file and copy into an empty folder

   2. Double-click the jar file Expected: Shows the GUI with a set of sample contacts. The window size may not be optimum.

2. Saving window preferences

   1. Resize the window to an optimum size. Move the window to a different location. Close the window.

   2. Re-launch the app by double-clicking the jar file.
      Expected: The most recent window size and location is retained.

7.2. Deleting a person

1. Deleting a person while all persons are being shown

   1. Prerequisites: List all persons using the list command. Multiple persons in the list.

   2. Test case: delete 1
      Expected: First contact is deleted from the list. Details of the deleted contact shown in the status message. Timestamp in the status bar is updated.

   3. Test case: delete 0
      Expected: No person is deleted. Error details shown in the status message. Status bar remains the same.

   4. Other incorrect delete commands to try: delete, delete x, ... (where x is larger than the list size)
      Expected: Similar to previous.

7.3. Saving data

1. Dealing with missing/corrupted data files

   1. Open the save file SoCompiler.json located in the file data and add garbage values. For example, add ! or - to a persons’ contact number.
   2. Re-launch the app by double-clicking the jar file.
      Expected: App opens with no person or module loaded. Save file is wiped clean.

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