Blue Team Aaron Kunz (Facilitator) Karim Tawil (GUI) Joe Reist (Server) Final Presentation of Alert Tracking System CEN 3031 Software Engineering, Summer 2005

Features Complete suite of administrative tools Users can be organized into an infinite number of arbitrarily named groups Flexible permissions hierarchy Permanent archive of all past alerts User-to-user and user-to-group messaging capability Fast response; users are notified of new alerts within 3 seconds.

Requirements Analysis

Design Solution (see next slide) The system is be entirely web based The system consists of a collection of PHP scripts interacting with an Oracle database. The PHP scripts interact with each other by passing POST variables and modifying SESSION variables, as shown on the next slide. The diagram on the next slide is designed to provide some insight into the structure of the system, but does not include all of the system functions (there are more than 20).

Details Users are allowed to post ‘alerts’ to the system which will then be viewable to other users depending on their group affiliation and/or permission level: A user’s ‘permission level’ is a number between Each alert has a similar permission level, which is chosen by the user who posts the alert. A user who is a member of a group may also designate the alert as ‘group only’. The newly posted alert will then be immediately visible to any user whose permission level is equal to or higher than the alert’s permission level (and who is also a member of the specified group if the ‘group only’ option is chosen). Users have the option of ‘accepting’ alerts, at which time the alert is moved from the active alert list into the alert archive, where it will remain until removed by the administrator.

Database Structure Table name Users Alerts Messages Alert_archive Function Contains each user’s username, password, permission level and group membership information. Contains all current alerts. Stores alert text, date posted, permission level, group designation, and a unique identification number for each alert. Contains all messages (this includes both user-to-user messages and user-to-group messages). Similar to the ‘Alerts’ table, this table stores all accepted/de-activated alerts. In addition to the information from the ‘Alerts’ table, this table also includes the name of the user who accepted the alert and the date that the alert was accepted.

Database Structure (continued) Table name Groups Group_* Function A list of names of all existing groups. A separate table exists for each group which lists the members of that group. The name of the table is “Group_”, followed by the group name. This allows for an infinite number or arbitrarily named groups since the system can find the group name in the ‘Groups’ list and simply concatenate ‘Group_’ and this name and perform whatever actions are necessary.

Try it! Main group website Test accounts for your convenience UsernamePasswordPermission levelGroup testtest 50one test2test 50one reistreist 33blue karimos123999blue adminx999 *a blank value in the ‘group’ column indicates that the user does not belong to a group ** you must log in as ‘admin’ to access the administrative tools