RIT Computer Science MS Project / Thesis Proposal
Contents
1. This table is used for recording all the information of each user identified by UserID EventlD UserlD Subject Location StartDate StartTime EndDate ShowTimeAs Private Recurrence Note Meeting _ 2 Strong 65 2 2004 10 30am 5 2 2004 12 00am Busy 2 Event 1Meeting Room1 3 5 2004 11 00am 5 2 2004 11 30am Busy F T pl F This table is used to record all the event information Each event is identified by EventID UserID is used to identify the user who created this event UserID is also acted as a foreign key which will relate to the User table Subject Location StartDate StartTime EndDate EndTime and Note are used to record the information of the event ShowTimeAs is used to show others your availability in this time period when they plan meetings Private is used to show that this event is private or not If Private is true this event is not allowed to be viewed by other people If Recurrence is true this event is a recurrence event and the recurrence information will be retrieved from Recurrence table If Meeting is true that means this is a meeting event and the attendee information will be retrieved from MeetingAttendee table MeetingAttendee EventID AttendeeUserlD Status Response poi 1 Accepted Optional This table is used for the meeting event AttendeeUserID is used to identify the people who will be attended to the meeting EventID i2. 20 Es oof Fulwel Fh Fr Sa IEEE 5 7 8 o prpzpspanspep 2 ai 22 23 24 25 26 27 2 129 30 31 Go to that day ABC Company Cd Associates i Assigned Proxies Li Jing Li dfdfd Add to Proxy gt We Rgre We Rgre De Joo Arr Grer De Joo Arr Grer Rom er Top Read Only Errt tgty Wet Dett Read Write discard changes and close form Cancel Save changes and ra close form Add appointment Add meeting ge Go to Today Contacts Proxy Today is January 24 2004 By Month January 2004 rtrt rtre E Gh ghg gfhg 20 Es oof FulWel Fh Fr Sa lela Ts 6 7 8 po prs re 20 21 22 23 24 Delete message Attendee availability Private Location Start Time Wed 1 28 2004 Fdlg dslf dlgfd glfdg dfl g fdgl Fdgj fdlgdf gffefd Free Tentative Busy Out of office No information Recurrence Form Appointment time Recurrence pattern 89 Daily Weekly Every weekday Monthly Yearly Range of recurrence O End after occurrences fni second third fourth Aedes ET tT smith David Lig Wu John C Tentative Busy Out of office Free Meeting Start Time Meeting End Time Attendee availability C Show attendee availability e Show a
3. 1 e no unique software is needed and with lots of very useful function The user can access the calendar service wherever a web browser exists A comparison analysis will be done between the proposed web server based calendar and those existing ones focusing on their functionality effectives and User Interface with look and feel This web calendar will be built with the functions like creating appointment proposing a meeting viewing the attendee s availability and the responses accessing and even changing the calendars of other users based on the given permission Introduction 1 The introduction of the existing calendars In today s world people rely on email and e calendar more and more It happens not only in companies universities and government departments but also in all kinds of societies and organizations It s very convenient to track appointments and tasks by using e calendar It s especially efficient in scheduling meetings as online access of the availability of the attendees and resources is made possible The responses from the attendees update the meeting attendance table automatically to make the meeting organizer know who are planning to attend the meeting The reminder function of the e calendars prevents the users from overlooking any events Several commercial e calendars are available such as Outlook calendar iCal and MeetingMaker These traditional calendars are widely used today Although it makes easy to set ap
4. As discussed before only the proposed calendar and Yahoo calendar don t need unique client software iCal and MeetingMaker also use web to publish calendars but the published calendars are read only can not be modified when accessed by web browsers Yahoo calendar doesn t use secure communication in the internet i e the packages transported between Yahoo server and the clients web browsers are not encrypted iCal stores calendar information appointments meetings in local Apple computer Other users can not access it before it is published in the web Meetingmaker stores calendar in both client and server The calendars stored in client and server synchronize periodically This model of date storage may cause problem sometimes when a PDA tries to synchronize calendar in different computers but the computers haven t synchronized with the server iCal and Yahoo can not update the meeting status automatically so the meeting organizer doesn t know who is going to attend the proposed meeting and who won t iCal and Yahoo calendars don t enable the meeting planers to check the attendee s availability too These two major disadvantages keep iCal and yahoo off effective meeting planning tools Only the proposed dynamic web server calendar and MeetingMaker have message list to list the meetings for easy assessment This feature is especially useful when a user has many meetings weekly for it provides an index of meetings so the u
5. On the right side of the layout buttons a text box will display today s date A calendar control is on the right side of the calendar with the current month displayed by default The days in the calendar control are clickable It will open the correspondent calendar of that day by clicking on that day in the calendar control Three navigation buttons are on the top of the calendar control to let the user to choose any month and year The above buttons and features are common to the two layouts The only difference between the two layouts is the scheduling field In day layout calendar this field displays the appointments and meetings of a chosen day as shown in Appendix p 1 By clicking on the Add appointment or Add meeting button the appointment or meeting scheduling page will be opened as shown in Appendix p 4 and p 14 The scheduled appointments and meetings are displayed in the table as blocks that occupy the first half hour time range of those events They are clickable for viewing details or for modification The month layout displays the appointments and meetings of a whole month each day occupies a table cell as shown in Appendix p 3 Clicking on the date link in a cell will open the day layout calendar of that correspondent day The appointments and meetings are listed in the table cells as links Clicking on a link will open it for viewing and editing Management of Proxies A user can let other users to access his or her own cale
6. be running at a web server and the users only need a web browser to access it if the user is granted the permission to access it The web server based calendar application can percept the client behaviors and take correspondent actions 1 the server will send dynamic web pages to the clients according to the clients behaviors Fig 6 shows the working model of the proposed dynamic web server based calendar It s a two way traffic model of communication between the server and the clients Dynamic web server s w Fig 6 Illustration of the dynamic web calendar model This dynamic web server based calendar will have unmatched conveniences since it can be accessed wherever there is a web browser It will also have the powerful appointment and meeting scheduling capacities The proposed dynamic web server based calendar is compared with other calendars and the results are listed in table 1 Table 1 Comparison of different calendars Outlook iCal MeetingMaker Yahoo Proposed Without unique client software x Z Dynamic web pages n a z ER iCal and MeetingMaker publish calendars on the web as static pages Secure communication E Information stored in server only n a Meeting status updated by attendee response automatically Check attendees availability when proposing meetings Meeting list Windows look and feel UI n a
7. other kind of calendars focusing on the functionality effectives and the interface with feel and look User manual Source code and deployment package Testing examples or demonstration References University of Cincinnati http www ucit uc edu documentation calendar pdf Scheduling with the Outlook Calendar 2002 Apple Computer Inc http www apple com ical iCal Help ver 1 5 2004 Meeting Maker Inc Meetingmaker User Guide p 17 2001 Yahoo Inc http www yahoo com 2004 MSDN Microsoft Developer Network Microsoft NET Developer Training Part No X08 43203 p 05 4 2001 Microsoft Corp online help in MSDN Library NET 2003 Farhan Muhammad and Matt Milner The Age of ASP NET Real World ASP NET Best Practices Apress p 1 2003 8 Chris Payne Secure You ASP NET Applications S4Ms Teach Yourself ASP NET in 21 Days p 698 2002 Provisional Schedule April 2004 The first version of the proposal was done May 2004 The final version of the proposal was done Aug 2004 Finish the project coding and the project test Sept 2004 Finish the project report and defense Appendix See file Appendix7 ppt A ee Add appointment Add meeting ge Goto Today Contacts Proxy Bv Month Today is January 24 2004 Monday February 12 2004 T Group Meeting Build 147 14 am 10 5 4 BI Seminar 220 23 12 30 30 EUM 30 EE 30 EN 30 Put out garbage bin
8. L Postgre and MS Access The choice of technology depends on the target environment For ASP NET the two most popular databases used are Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle In this project Microsoft SQL Server 2000 will be used as the database server Functional Specification Web Calendar Layouts The web calendar can be displayed in two layouts By Day and By Month Appendix p 1 shows the Day layout calendar The top row of buttons are the task buttons The first button Add appointment will open the appointment scheduling page as shown in Appendix p 14 The second button Add meeting will open the meeting scheduling page where the user proposes meetings as shown in Appendix p 4 The third button Message will open a page to show the list of incoming meeting requests as shown in Appendix p 10 The Go to Today button will display today s appointments and meetings The Contacts button will open a page to display the accessible users for meeting scheduling as shown in Appendix p 8 The Proxy button will open a page as shown in Appendix p 2 for giving privilege to other persons to access the user s calendar The user can also access other person s calendar from here The second row of buttons are for the display layout There are two buttons in this row By Day and By Month Clicking on the By Day button will open the day layout calendar Clicking on the By Month button will open the month layout calendar as shown in Appendix p 3
9. RIT Computer Science MS Project Thesis Proposal Title A dynamic web server based appointment calendar Name Jianxia Zhong Abstract Nowadays the Internet has become the most popular way for people to sharing their information While many of the web pages on the Internet are static web pages they don t change in response to user input With the development of the server side technology more and more web application allows users to interact with the web server This is the dynamic web application In this project I will use the most advanced server side technology Microsoft NET Framework which is running on the Windows operating system built with IIS Internet Information Services and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 which is used as the Database server for the persistence layer to develop a dynamic web server based calendar to handle appointment and meeting scheduling It s a new calendar in architecture and functions comparing to the traditional calendars The existing commercial calendars such as Outlook calendar iCal and MeetingMaker have a common weakness unique calendar software should be installed in user s computer They are all not web based calendar Some existing web calendar like Yahoo calendar their function is very limited For example they couldn t get the response from the meeting attendee automatically and view the attendee availability In this proposal a web server based calendar is proposed to overcome this weakness
10. ally marked by that meeting request and that meeting request also shows up in the Message list as shown in Appendix p 10 After a user received a meeting request he or she can click on the Message button on the top of the calendar to open the Message list page By clicking on the link in the Subject column a read only meeting page will be opened for the user to response as shown in Appendix p 11 If the user doesn t want to reply he or she can simply close the form He or she can also click the Delete button By doing so this piece of event will be deleted from his or her calendar and from the Message list table The response Accept Tentative or Decline will update the Attendee availability page and the Message list page automatically The user can also set an event as recurrent event By clicking on the Recurrence button that located on the top of the appointment or meeting scheduling pages Appendix p 4 6 7 the recurrence form will be opened as shown in Appendix p 5 The user can set up various recurrent patterns for the appointment or meeting from here Four major patterns are available Daily Weekly Monthly and Yearly The user can also set the range of recurrence 1 the starting and ending date of the recurrence The appointment or meeting time can also be setup in this page Security and Database Design As a security measurement Users are required to login to use the web calendar The login screen lo
11. extensible and easy to use way to build deploy and run web applications that target any browser ASP NET is a compiled NET Framework based environment where applications can be authored in any NET Framework compatible language including Visual Basic C J C and JScript So unlike classic ASP in which you had to depend on interpreted VBScript and JScrip languages ASP NET provides a wide choice of programming languages In addition to the usual web applications ASP NET allows developers to create other types applications which enables you to extend your applications reach to new customers and business partners For example XML Web Services enable sharing of data across the Internet regardless of the operating system and the programming language also ASP NET provides lots mobile controls that enable your application to target a large number of mobile web devices Besides the advantages mentioned above the NET Framework also provides another benefit to developers Direct Support for Security Window NT Windows 2000 and Windows XP have a number of security features based on Access Control Lists ACLs An ACL contains a number of entries that specify which users may access or are explicitly denied access to resources such as files and printers ACLs are a great way of protecting executable files applications from unauthorized access But they do not secure all parts of the file The NET Framework enables both developers and
12. ink the contact page will be opened for the meeting scheduler to invite attendees and reserve resources as shown in Appendix p 8 An attendee can be marked either as required person or as optional person The subject and location are not required for the program but are necessary for the user otherwise the invited attendees will not know what the meeting is for The starting and ending time of the event can be input in this page The Show time as DropDownList has five options Free Tentative Busy Out of office and No information It shows the user s availability in that time period to other meeting schedulers The user can type or paste appointment notes or meeting notes in the Notes TextBox The page of the Attendee availability graphically shows the availability of the meeting attendees as shown in Appendix p 6 The meeting scheduler is the default first attendee in the All attendees column Three navigator buttons above the availability table help the organizer to see the availability of the attendees in any day The meeting scheduler can set the starting and ending time in this page also If the link show attendee status was clicked the page of attendee status will be opened as shown in Appendix p 7 This is a read only page It will show the attendee status and responses During planning a meeting the Response column is empty When an invited attendee receives the meeting request his or her calendar is automatic
13. ndar by assigning proxy privilege to them as shown in the region framed by solid lines in Appendix p 2 Firstly highlight the person you want to assign proxy in the ListBox Secondly click on the to Proxy gt button to add the person to the Assigned Proxies ListBox By default the assigned proxy is read only i e that person can view your calendar but cannot modify it You can change it to Read and Write by clicking on the Read Write button The Properties button will open the contact information page of the chosen person as shown in Appendix p 9 which provides some identity information of other persons to the user A user can display and or modify other person s calendar if he or she has the permission It s illustrated in the region framed by the dash lines in Appendix p 2 Scheduling Appointments and Meetings The 015 to schedule appointment and meeting look similar The difference is that an appointment will not involve other persons so it doesn t have the tab of Attendee Availability and the To field The meeting scheduling page is illustrated in Appendix p 4 there are two tabs in the tab strip Meeting tab and Attendee availability tab The Meeting tab shows this page Appendix p 4 and the Attendee availability tab shows another page Appendix p 6 If the Private check box is checked in the page of Meeting tab this piece of appointment or meeting cannot be seen by others By clicking on the To l
14. ng web browsers If they are iCal users they can even subscribe to your calendar and have immediate access to it from 1Cal Mn gt f Tute al ellol Fig 3 iCal Calendar in Day View layout Fig 4 shows two working models of iCal to share calendars iCal publishes calendars on a local WebDEV server so the users in the local intranet can share the published calendars as shown in Fig 4 a iCal publishes calendars on Mac through internet so users on the internet can access those published calendars as shown in Fig A b WebDEV server peojumoq Local Intranet model Internet model a b Fig 4 iCal sharing calendar models When a user requests a shared calendar using web browser the Mac or local WebDEV server delivers the shared calendar to the client s web browser But the interaction between the web browser and the Mac or WebDEV server is very limited MeetingMaker is copyrighted by Meeting Maker Inc which is running in cross platforms such as Windows Macintosh and Solaris Pl The secure communication across the internet between the clients and server is through SSL Security Sockets Layer protocol Fig 5 schematically shows the working model of MeetingMaker MeetingMaker server s w MeetingMaker Client s w MeetingMaker Client s w Fig 5 Illustration of how MeetingMaker works The MeetingMaker client software must be installed in each client com
15. oks like Fig 7 Form authentication method P will be used to verify the user name and password provided by the user The user s password will be encrypted and saved in the database Welcome message Product name version Fig 7 Login screen When a client s browser accesses the website of the calendar server for instance https www mybcalendar com login aspx a login screen page will be sent to the client s browser Then the user needs to submit a valid user name and password to the web server If login succeeds a default calendar page Appendix p 1 will be sent to the client s browser It is a DHTML page and includes the user s own meeting and appointment schedules If login fails the fields of User name and Password will be cleared and wait for re login Nine major user tables will be created in the calendar database SQL server authentication is used for secure access to the SOL database When a connection request is made SQL server receives both a login ID and a password that must be included in the connection string which it validates against the list of logins identified to it by the system administrator Samples of these related tables are listed below User UserlD FirstName LastName MiddleName Email BPhone HPhone BFax Password 1Jane Zhong j jane zhong0 lycos com 4255366 5867310 5867310 jzhong D9 54 7B 2Jing Li jingli me rochester edu 2655443 5867310 jli DC 55 R
16. pointments and meetings these calendars require unique software be installed in user s computers It s sometimes very inconvenient such as in traveling and remote accessing Outlook calendar is an application of Microsoft Office Suite It has the largest user population because over 90 of personal computers have Microsoft Office Suite as the major office software Both the Outlook exchange server and clients are running in local intranet Calendar Microsoft Outlook 18 10 x File Edit view Favorites Tools Actions Help a question for help Cs New amp X 53 Month E Schedules E og lt p Back c amp Day Week Month c Calendar may 17 2004 Address Monday May 17 4 May 2004 June 2004 SM TW TFS aoM TW T E S 2526 27 2829 30 1 2345 67 8 6 7 8 91011 12 910 11 12 1314 15 1314 15 16 17 18 19 16 18 19 2021 22 2021 22 2324 25 26 2324 25 26 Bz 28 29 272829 30 1 2 3 45 67 8 910 D taskPad um ees Click here to add a new Task CAE BOW meeting 147 2104 ick here to add a new Ta Fig 1 Outlook calendar in Day View layout Fig 1 shows a typical UI of Outlook calendar In Outlook calendar a user can set appointments propose meetings set reminders check the availability of others check the responses of meeting requests Fig 2 schematically shows how Outlook calendar Works Outlook Outlook Exchange
17. puters The client computers can be a mixture of different OS platforms A MeetingMaker server is running to provide service to the clients The clients communicate with the server interactively through the internet The SSL protocol is used to provide secure communication MeetingMaker can also publish calendars on the web so other users can access the shared calendars using any web browsers Again the interaction between MeetingMaker server and the client s web browser is very limited Yahoo calendar is a web server calendar too which doesn t require unique client software and can be accessed wherever a web browser exists But its functionality is very limited For instance the server can not take the response from the meeting attendees automatically so that the meeting organizer doesn t know who accept and who reject the meeting request the meeting proposer can not check the availability of the attendees These two shortages keep Yahoo calendar off the effective meeting scheduling tools Yahoo calendar is too simple to be used in the places that functions and efficiency are required There is also security concern that the packages transported between Yahoo calendar s web server and the user browser are not encrypted 2 The introduction of the proposed calendar and the comparison with those existing calendars A new calendar model is proposed in this proposal to overcome the weakness of the existing calendars The calendar web application will
18. s used to retrieve the information from the Event Table and is also used to retrieve all the attendee ID for a specific Meeting identified by the EventID Status is used to show the attendee is Required or Optional Response is used to record the response from the attendee EventlD StartDate RangePattern RangeValue RecurPattern 312004 NoEnd _ FreqRecu 3 6 2004 End Until 5 6 2005 WkdayRecur This table is used to record the recurrence event s information If the Recurrence field value for an EventID is true in Event table the recurrence information will be retrieved from this table by the condition of Recurrence EventID Event EventID StartDate is the day from which this event starts to be a recurrence event RangePattern and RangeValue is used to show how long this recurrence will last FreqRecurPatn EventID RepeatRange Every Third Every other This table is used as connection with the table of Recurrence to record the value when RecurPattern value in Recurrence table equals to FreqRecur WeekNumber This table is used as connection with the table of Recurrence to record the value when RecurPattern value in Recurrence table equals to Wkdayrecur AssigningUserlD AssignedUserlD Permission This table is used for proxy AssigningUserID is used to identify the user who assigns the proxy to other users AssignedUserID is used to identify the users who is assigned the pro
19. ser doesn t need to look for them all over in the calendar The proposed calendar Outlook and MeetingMaker have the so called Windows look and feel user interface which make them very user friendly since many people are used to the Windows UI The proposed dynamic web server based calendar is the only one to have all the listed features or advantages The advanced technology of NET framework makes it possible that will be discussed in the section of design specifications Till now there is not a mature dynamic web server based calendar on the marketplace The proposed calendar in this project will be the first dynamic web server based calendar developed in NET framework that can be used by end users 3 The introduction of the technologies used in this project To implement the dynamic web server based calendar model in Fig 6 ASP NET is the right tool for creating rich and dynamic Web sites Prior to the advent of ASP NET three main technologies and platforms were available to develop web applications ASP Java Server Pages JSP and the Open Source web platform commonly referred to as LAMP Linux Apache plus MySQL plus either perl Python or PHP as the programming language But the ASP NET is currently the most technologically advanced feature rich and powerful platform for building distributed applications transported by the HTTP protocol It provides a new programming model and infrastructure that provides a component based
20. server s w client s w Outlook Outlook utloo utloo client s w Remote client Local Intranet Internet Fig 2 Illustration of how Outlook calendar works An Outlook exchange server is running in the local intranet and Outlook client software is running in the client computers The clients and the server have interactions to exchange information A remote Outlook client can also exchange information with the server through Internet by Virtual Private Network VPN VPN software must also be installed in the remote client to access the exchange server While Outlook Calendar running in Microsoft Windows platform iCal calendar is running in Macintosh OS platform Even through their functionality looks similar they are built on different architectures Fig 3 shows a typical UI of iCal calendar In iCal different calendars are color coded and displayed all together The calendars of other users can also be displayed together with the user s own calendars It has similar functions as those of Outlook i e setting appointments meetings inviting attendees setting reminders iCal is a stand alone application that must be installed in the local computer A user s calendars can not be accessed by other users unless they are published on the web That means others don t know when you are available unless you publish your calendars in the web iCal publishes calendars on Mac or local WebDEV server so others can access those calendars usi
21. system administrators to specify method level security The NET Framework uses industry standard protocols such as TCP IP and means of Communications such as the Extensible Markup Language XML Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP and HTTP to facilitate distributed application communications This makes distributed computing more secure ASP NET uses the Common Language Runtime CLR provided by the NET Framework The CLR is the NET runtime which manages the execution of code The CLR allows the objects which are created in different language to interact with each other and hence removes the language barrier CLR thus makes web application development more efficient Microsoft made most ActiveX controls be available in the ASP NET 6 which enabled a website authored in ASP NET could deliver similar functionality as a Windows application The ASP NET supports several kinds of language such as Visual Basic Visual C Visual C Visual J and Visual J Basically any of the language can do the same implementation Visual Basic and Visual C are the most popular language among them for they are simple to use C NET will be used as the coding language in this project Databases often play an integral part in storing the information and the scripting language query the database to create the dynamic web page Some popular relational databases which are used for the persistence layer are Oracle DB2 Microsoft SQL Server Sybase MySQ
22. ttendee status Name Response Zhong Jane None Smith David Accepted Room 204 Accepted Tee John Tentative From group ABC Company Cd Associates Li dfdfd We Rgre De Joo Arr Grer Room 223 Laptop 101 Errt tgty Wet Dett discard changes Save changes and and close form close form Phone numbers Message list 10 Read only mode Meeting Attendee availability Location Start Time Wed 1 28 2004 End Time Wed 1 28 2004 Show time as Fdlg dslf dlgfd glfdg dfl g fdgl Fdgj fdlgdf gffefd 11 Read only mode Attendee availability 8 Show attendee availability Q Show attendee status 44 __ Monday February 02 2004 Tuesday February 03 2004 8am 8am 12pm ES IZhong Jane tT Smith David ET Wu John C Tentative Out of office No information Read only mode Attendee availability C Show attendee availability e Show attendee status Name Response Zhong Jane None Smith David Accepted Room 204 Accepted Tee John Tentative Appointment Private Subject Location Fdlg dslf dlgfd glfdg dfl g fdgl Fdgj fdlgdf gffgfd Free Tentative Busy Out of office No information 14
23. xy with Read or Read Write Permission by another user This table is used for recording all the resource like the conference room and project etc StartTime 3 5 2004 10 00am 3 5 2004 12 00am 5 4 2004 9 30am 5 4 2004 11 00am This table is used for reserving the resource for meeting event The Database Entity Relationship Diagram AssigningUserID UserID AssignedUserID FirstName Permission LastName MiddleName Response Resource ResourcelD UserName ResourceName Password Subject Location StartDate StartTime EndDay EventID StartDate ResourceUsed ResourcelD EndTime ShowTimeAs StartTime RangePattern EndTime Private RangeValue Recurrence RecurPattern Note Meeting WkdayRecurPatn EventID EventID WeekNumber FreqRecurPatn Frequency WeekdayValue RepeatRange RepeatRange 1 1 0 20 1 0 1 The calendar information is stored in these nine major tables that can be accessed by stored procedures using SQL language There will be three layers to implement this project The presentation layer will include all the ASP pages and their code behind files The business layer will be responsible for access the database and some relative classes The database layer will implement all the stored procedures using SQL language 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Principle Deliverables A functional web calendar server Comparison analysis with
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