Case Study: Address Book Application

SCENARIO

ESSENCE OF THE CASE

• You created an address book application in Visual Basic.

• Beta testers commented that reporting of the results in the application was not properly performed.

• You implement a better and more organized way to display results.

You have been working lately on an address book project in Visual Basic that uses SQL Server as the underlying database. You have created most of the program code and have already implemented the body of the project. So far, users can enter unlimited addresses and phone numbers through the easy-to-use graphical interface. After you have completed the project, you send it to a couple of beta testers to perfect the work. One strongly emphasized comment you receive is that the application lacks the proper reporting capabilities. The beta tester adds that retrieving a single address or phone number is a time-consuming process, because you have to scroll and manually find the address or phone number you want. He suggests that you program some sort of doodad into your application to allow easy address searching.

ANALYSIS

After reading the comment from one of the beta testers, you realize that reporting in your application is not functional. You decide to implement a search feature and an ordering feature, to make it easy to find a particular address or phone number. You look at the different data retrieval commands available in the T-SQL library and find the WHERE clause and LIKE predicate helpful. You alter your existing program to include this change by adding two components : first, searches that use the LIKE predicate, and second, the ordering of processed information. Now a user can, for example, order results by first name or last name and can perform partial word searches throughout the records. After altering the program code, you realize that the coding was not as difficult as you expected; however, this new change will save a great a great deal of time for the end user.