Surya De

Good question John. I would like that to be clarified as well since I have gone your route so far and I have used the java.alang package exception and not provided my own.

Surya

So am I to take it for example when you are creating the entire tablemodel for all the records...your business method calls the read method a whole bunch of times? The read method is I think specified in the DB file of B&S.

Surya

Quite useful, Gary thanks.

Hello Yu,

I faced a similar question as well and my take on this topic is this...that you should read and store the data in a collection, easier to creat your tablemodel, etc etc from there. And also consider that when you implement RMI or Sockets to simulate the networking part of your assignment, the thing to consider is that it would be requiring a huge overhead if you were writing reading updating to and from the network connection all the time unless you just have one collection object like a cache that stores all the records that you can then manipulate and so on.

However while on this topic, for example the read method which reads a specified record from the db file how are we to prove to the examiner that the method is in fact actually reading the specified record from the file and not from the collection cache itself? I am kind of confused. I dont know how to address this problem.

Surya

As far as I know if you submit the assignment after March then you have to switch to JDK 1.5. I think if you submit prior to that you can do it using either 1.4 or 1.5. I am not too sure.

Surya

Thanks for the post Andrew. Things are getting clearer. But then you would recommend having a separate test package that exercises all the create, test and delete etc functionality instead of having it menu driven on the gui?

Cheers,
Surya

PS: I hope I didnt hijack this thread and I hope I am not asking too many questions to the point of becoming pesky like that little fly around the moose's head!

Andrew is right. Could you please clarify? I am most interested.

Cheers!
Surya

Hi Macy,

I think a lot of users have gone ahead and created a Help menu in the toolbar for the app. I think that is a great idea but I think what you are doing should work fine. Just a general command line howto in the text document you are writing should work. I could be mistaken however. Can someone please clarify?

Surya

Thanks for the post. What is confusing to me is how the final grading process takes place. Is there a human factor included? Like a person would sit down with your code, read your README and CHOICES files and know how to operate the program and then test out its functionality? Or is it going to be an automated software program churning through your code and scoring you? If it is a human tester, then it makes sense to have a GUI create/delete thing going on...like a popupmenu on the table, select your option, if you delete the record vanishes from display and if you create a new window opens up with a form entrylike look and voila! Simple! Logical! Clean! No room for doubt!

Cheers,
Surya

I thought however that we are required to implement the create method which is part of the DB interface. How would one go about creating a record without using GUI?

Surya

Good point. I would like it to be clarified as well. Personally I am calling the trim function when I am picking up the individual field values. My guess is that when writing back the values using the RandomAccessFile api, since we have to write back at specific positions and we are to use a file pointer for that purpose, I think the api would handle it automatically. But I am not sure.

Cheers,
Surya

Animesh,

I have been using an IDE and I got a jdk 5 reference guide to make sure I understand what generics are and autoboxing and enums and some other features of jdk 5. Even though I signed up for 1.4 I am compiling on jdk5 since it does both 1.4 and 1.5 no problem with the occasional compiler warnings. Believe me porting your code to jdk 5 the biggest change you will require is the implementation of generics and that is it...from my experience. Good luck on your assignment. IT is a brain buster.

Cheers,
Surya

Hello fellow ranchers,

Here is my question. I have been reading a couple posts where you ranchers mention the Data and the BodgittScarperData class. Now as of right now I only have a Data class implementing the DB class. Where does this BodgitScarperData class fit in? Is this supposed to be the class that does the reading from the file and population of a collection class with all the Contractor records from the db flatfile? I am quite confused right now. Any thoughts would help me out a lot. I am able to get the UI showing the records on when there is no network connection. I think I am missing something fundamental that would enable me to fix the RMI stuff as well.

Cheers,
Surya

Cheers Andrew,

Thanks for the reply. I was going to go with the second option myself. Thanks.

I would like that question answered as well. I am rather confused with the RMI myself because this is the first time I have programmed using that framework. I understand the overall idea but I think I am doing something fundamentally wrong resulting in a very annoying exception.