Projects by Dwayne Desmarais
The decision to add the database prior to creating the search feature was a good learning experience within the development of these added features. Having all the databases created first, made designing and testing the search feature easier. It is important to consider all the improvements being made to a program prior to beginning the programming for any specific component. Planning out which ones would be most beneficial to work on first is a key part of program design and division of work across multiple teams.
The only issue I encountered was an oversight on the menu system, I utilized (E) for both Employee and Exit which initially caused some issues until I recognized and modified Employee to use (m) instead. From then on, the issues were minimal with the construction of the database. The search feature proved to be rather simple with such a small database system. There was no need to use a binary search since the databases only included a handful of animals, employees, and habitats. This made the program simpler, but one thing to consider is whether it could be expanded, in this situation, even adding multiple locations would not cause a performance issue, a computer system can easily search through hundreds of database entries without an issue, even using a looping system. Beyond this, a better search feature that is quicker at searching through records would be needed.
Zoo Monitor Revised (zip)
Note: This file includes the additional Employee database added to the monitoring system program.