(i) Nature of the Solution Design (i) Nature of the Solution

Learning Outcomes: By the end of this section you should have: designed methods of navigation through the system menus & screens designed the methods of data input input forms specified any validation required input masks, validation rules designed the methods of data storage tables, fields, keys, relationships designed the output required from the system output forms

Design - Nature of the Solution this is where you create, on paper, all the designs that will be used to develop the solution your ideas of what the solution will look like  the overall aim is that you should be able to pass all the design diagrams onto a third party they should be able to create the required solution. you’ve already designed the data structure tables, fields, data types, keys, relationships, validation ....

Design Specification You now need to draw up (on paper) designs for: input documents, manual data-capture forms menus  data entry screens search screens output screens output documents reports Note: all designs need to be annotated

Design Specification 3 steps to putting together your Design Specification: Design and annotate everything on paper (hand drawn) now get your end-user to write comments on your designs Re-design and annotate on paper in the light of your end users comments on your first design now get your end-user to write comments on your 2nd draft Transfer your designs to Access these will be used as your “mock-ups” can also be used as the “real thing” (later) get your client to approve the mock-ups by exchange of emails

Input Screen Designs The above shows the main menu screen. The “View/Edit Rooms” and the “View/Edit Teachers” will both be password protected to ensure that the data within these tables cannot be edited by anyone. The school logo will be an embedded image, with a border around it and will be imported from a jpg picture file given by the School. The close button will close the entire application. The text on all of the buttons will maroon as per the design specification. I will create the border in the same maroon to co-ordinate with the text colour.

Screen Design Specification

Input Screen Designs

Search Screen Designs

Report Designs

Navigational Pathways

Data Structure Design ‘Hand-drawn’ designs of : entity structure in standard notation CUSTOMER(CustID, Title, Forename, Surname, ……) ‘4-column’ table showing data structure for each entity see template on website Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) showing the degree of each relationship table showing validation designs for each entity you can use software but not screenshots from Access

‘4-column’ table

‘4-column’ table

Validation

Entity Relationship Diagram