Tan Zhan Ming - Project Portfolio for FinSec

The Budget feature relies primarily on the Claim and Income features, and serves as an extension to calculate their difference. The Budget object calculates the cash amount values of all existing Income objects and all cash amount values of Claims that have a status of 'approved'. It then returns the difference in values as the budget value and creates a graph detailing the statistics for the month.

Figure 2.6.2.1 is a sequence of steps that illustrates the interaction between various classes when the budget command is entered.

Step 1 : The budget command is passed on to the LogicManager as commandText

Step 2 : The LogicManager::execute method then calls FinSecParser::parseCommand which receives the user input (budget) as a parameter.

Step 3 : FinSecParser then references the various command words and identifies the command to be a budget command . It then calls the BudgetCommand class.

Step 4 : This newly created BudgetCommand object is returned to the LogicManager class, which then calls the BudgetCommand::execute method.

Step 5 : The BudgetCommand then interacts with the model component of our software architecture to create a filteredList of all Income and Claim objects using the model.getFilteredClaimList() and model .getFilteredIncomeList() methods.

Step 6 : It instantiates a Budget object which contains methods such as calculateTotalExpenses() and calculateBudget() to calculate the amount values of all the Claims, Incomes and thus use them to find the budget amount.
A BudgetGraph object is also created in parallel (Details expanded upon below)

Step 7: The BudgetCommand::execute finally completes by constructing a message string containing all these values and returning a new CommandResult with the specific message string to its calling method which is LogicManager::execute.

Step 8 : LogicManager::execute method returns a CommandResult to the calling method which is MainWindow::executeCommand.

Step 9 : The specific feedback is then retrieved through CommandResult::getFeedbackToUser and set in the result display of the MainWindow.

While creating the Budget object, a BudgetGraph object is also created in parallel. The activity diagram below shows how it would look like from a user’s point of view.

Figure 2.6.2.2 describes the workflow of FinSec when the budget command is entered.

The series of steps below demonstrates what the BudgetGraph object does in parallel to Step 6 above.

Step 6a : At the same time the Budget object is created, the BudgetGraph object is also instantiated, which is basically an XY-graph.

Step 6b : The BudgetGraph object creates a dataset by taking in the list of Claims and Incomes and parsing them to the ClaimPlotter, IncomePlotter and BudgetPlotter classes.

Step 6c : The 3 plotter classes then filter their respective lists to create new lists for the current month and start adding the points to the series.

The code snippet below shows the ClaimPlotter::plotClaims method

Step 6d : Once the 3 series have been returned, the plotter classes then return the completed dataset to the BudgetGraph class which then renders the image.

Step 6e : The BudgetCommand::execute method then calls the BudgetGraph::displayBudgetGraph method to display the graph image.

With so many claims and incomes, all having differing dates, it can be hard to keep track of how much money one should have on hand at any one time.

We have considered between two differing graph designs.

We have settled on adopting a single-graph approach as having multiple graphs open can lead to the user being overwhelmed by unnecessary data, and the code needed to achieve this result satisfactorily would be too convoluted.

{End of extract for budget command}

If you are interested to find out more about my technical documentation skills, you can click on the link below to view more of my handiwork; this time detailing the help command in the FinSec developer guide. (DG-help)