PROJECT: Internship Diary

Overview

Internship Diary is a desktop internship tracking application written in Java, and has about 15 kLoC. The user interacts with it using a CLI, and it has a GUI created with JavaFX.

Summary of contributions

  • Major enhancement: Revamp the find command

    • What it does: This enhancement enables the general find where the keywords that the user entered will list any internship application that has fields that matches any of the keywords provided. This enhancement also enables finding by specific field(s), where the user can specify which field(s) they are interested in searching in. Only the internship applications that has the field(s) matching the specified field(s) keywords will be listed in this case.

    • Justification: This feature will allow the user to easily filter the list to quickly get to what is important. With the flexibility of general and specific find, the user can get a more specific filtered list if needed.

    • Highlights: Quite a bit of planning was involved, mainly to consider how the search should behave and how it is performed. It the end, the plan to use predicates was decided as it will be easy to extend the application with minimal changes in the command. Quite a bit of knowledge on how predicates work is also required as there was a need to find out how to combine many predicates cleanly so that it is readable and to ensure that it is working correctly. There was also a need decide on how I should allow the user to tell the system which of the two types of find command to invoke. It was decided in the end to use the same command word and have the type of user input be the way of telling the system which type of find to invoke.

  • Minor enhancement: Add visual display of upcoming application deadlines and interviews and inactive applications

    • What it does: This enhancement allows the user to determine which application has deadlines or interviews due in 7 days or if there are ghosted application by the color of the internship application in the list. Internship applications with upcoming deadline or interview will show green while ghosted applications will show red.

    • Justification: This enhancement will allow the user to know what is upcoming and what is ghosted/inactive at a quick glance.

    • Highlights: Figuring out where the code to update the color should go was a challenge. Setting it directly in CSS was not possible as I still wanted to keep the odd and even colors for the list. When setting it in code, I had to figure out why the style will not revert to the default CSS style, leading to visual bugs. The bugs were fixed after some research.

  • Code contributed: RepoSense

  • Other contributions:

    • Project management:

      • Managed releases v1.2 - v1.4 (3 releases) on GitHub

    • Enhancement to existing features:

      • Helped with refactoring of Internship Diary from Address Book by adding the model classes and updating DG diagrams and text: (PRs: #22)

      • Contributed to adding some test cases for various parts of the code to help maintain a coverage of around 75%: (PRs: #30 #53 #69 #85)

    • Documentation:

      • Helped with the refactoring of the developer guide from AB3 to Internship Diary: (PRs: #20)

    • Community:

Contributions to the User Guide

Given below are sections I contributed to the User Guide. They showcase my ability to write documentation targeting end-users.

Locating internship applications: find

Finds all internship application(s) with the specified fields containing any of the given keywords.

The find parameters will appear at the bottom left of the internship diary

Format: find [KEYWORDS] [c/COMPANY] [r/ROLE] [a/ADDRESS] [p/PHONE] [e/EMAIL] [d/DATE] [w/PRIORITY] [s/STATUS]

  • At least one of the optional parameter must be provided.

  • If [KEYWORDS] is provided, find will look for matches in any field except for application date based on KEYWORDS (i.e. OR search), regardless of whether other fields are specified.

  • When fields are specified without [KEYWORDS], only applications where all the specified fields match are returned (i.e. AND search). e.g. find c/google r/software engineer will return application with company being Google and role being Software Engineer but not company that is Facebook and role being Software Engineer.

  • The search is case insensitive. e.g google will match Google.

  • The order of the keywords does not matter. e.g. AI Singapore will match Singapore AI.

  • Companies matching at least one keyword will be returned (i.e. OR search). e.g. AI Singapore will return AISingapore, AI Malaysia.

  • Partial words will be matched e.g. find a/Singapore will match internship application with address field named Singapores.

  • Consecutive find command calls will not stack on the resulting list from the preceding find command. It is always performed on either the main list or archival list (shown on the bottom left of the program window).

Example(s):

  • find Google
    Lists internship application(s) with company Google OR with email alice@google.com.

BeforeFind1
Figure 1. Before executing find Google.
AfterFind1
Figure 2. After executing find Google.

  • find c/Google s/applied
    Lists internship application(s) with company Google AND status applied.

BeforeFind2
Figure 3. Before executing find c/Google s/applied.
AfterFind2
Figure 4. After executing find c/Google s/applied.

Contributions to the Developer Guide

Given below are sections I contributed to the Developer Guide. They showcase my ability to write technical documentation and the technical depth of my contributions to the project.

Find Command

The find command allows the user to get a filtered list of internship applications. The following sequence diagram will illustrate the process of invocation for the command:

FindSequenceDiagram
Figure 5. Interactions inside the Logic Component for the find c/google r/software command

The following subsections will go through the general implementations of the find command, as well as the 2 versions of the command, find any match, and find match by fields.

Implementation

The find command is implemented in the class FindCommand and uses the FindCommandParser class to parse the arguments for the command.

To facilitate the find command, several predicates classes implementing Predicate<InternshipApplication> are used:

  • CompanyContainsKeywordsPredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s Company field contains any substring matching any words in the list supplied by its constructor CompanyContainsKeywordsPredicate(List<String> keywords).

  • RoleContainsKeywordsPredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s Role field contains any substring matching any words in the list supplied by its constructor RoleContainsKeywordsPredicate(List<String> keywords).

  • AddressContainsKeywordsPredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s Address field contains any substring matching any words in the list supplied by its constructor AddressContainsKeywordsPredicate(List<String> keywords).

  • PhoneContainsNumbersPredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s Phone field contains any substring matching any words in the list supplied by its constructor PhoneContainsNumbersPredicate(List<String> numbers).

  • EmailContainsKeywordsPredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s Email field contains any substring matching any words in the list supplied by its constructor EmailContainsKeywordsPredicate(List<String> keywords).

  • PriorityContainsNumbersPredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s Priority field exactly matches any words in the list supplied by its constructor PriorityContainsNumbersPredicate(List<String> numbers).

  • ApplicationDateIsDatePredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s ApplicationDate field is exactly the date supplied by its constructor ApplicationDateIsDatePredicate(List<String> dateArr). The constructor will parse dateArr into a LocalDate.

  • StatusContainsKeywordsPredicate — Predicate to check if an internship application’s Status field contains any substring matching any words in the list supplied by its constructor StatusContainsKeywordsPredicate(List<String> keywords).

The following class diagram show the relationship of the above mentioned predicates, Predicate, FindCommandParser and FindCommand:

FindClassDiagram
Figure 6. Class diagram to show relationship between Predicates, FindCommandParser and FindCommand

Find Any Match

This version of the command is invoked when the user enters the command with preamble text in the parameter, e.g. find google facebook or find google r/software. The command will perform search for any internship application where any of the fields Company, Role, Address, Phone, Email, Priority or Status contains a substring matching at least one word in the preamble and display them, e.g. find google facebook will look for internship applications whose any of the above fields contains the substring google or facebook.

The searching and displaying of the internship application is done by performing an OR operation on all the predicates CompanyContainsKeywordsPredicate, RoleContainsKeywordsPredicate, AddressContainsKeywordsPredicate, PhoneContainsNumbersPredicate, EmailContainsKeywordsPredicate, PriorityContainsNumbersPredicate and StatusContainsKeywordsPredicate to get a single predicate and passing that into the method updateFilteredInternshipApplicationList() of the ModelManager instance.

Find Match by Fields

This version of the command is invoked when the user enters the command without any preamble text in the parameter, e.g. find c/google r/software. The command will perform a search for any internship application where the fields Company, Role, Address, Phone, Email, ApplicationDate, Priority and Status match any of the supplied word after their respective prefixes (if a field’s prefix is not specified, the field is not checked), e.g. find c/google facebook d/01 02 2020 will look for internship applications where the Company field contains a substring google or facebook and the ApplicationDate field matching the date 1st February 2020.

The searching and displaying of the internship application is done by performing an AND operation on the required predicates that is any of CompanyContainsKeywordsPredicate, RoleContainsKeywordsPredicate, AddressContainsKeywordsPredicate, PhoneContainsNumbersPredicate, EmailContainsKeywordsPredicate, ApplicationDateIsDatePredicate, PriorityContainsNumbersPredicate and StatusContainsKeywordsPredicate to get a single predicate and passing that into the method updateFilteredInternshipApplicationList() of the ModelManager instance.

Determine which Find to Invoke

The following activity diagram summarises how which type of find to invoke is determined:

FindCommandActivityDiagram
Figure 7. Activity Diagram to show how the type of find to invoke is determined

Design Considerations

Aspect: How to implement the different versions of Find command

  • Alternative 1 (current choice): Use a standardized command with the version to invoke determined by the type of user input parameters.

    • Pros: More streamlined, only one command.
      This ensures that the user dont have to remember multiple command to use the different versions.

    • Cons: Longer and less specific execute method.

  • Alternative 2: Use separate commands for the different versions of find.

    • Pros: More specific execute method for each of the command.

    • Cons: Makes the user remember more commands.

  • Alternative 3: Use the first word of the user input parameter to select which version of find command to invoke.

    • Pros: Slightly more streamlined than multiple commands.
      This still requires user to remember the right words to invoke the different versions.

    • Cons: Longer and less specific execution method.

Appendix A: Product Survey

Below are some of the programs currently available that could be used to manage internship applications, as well as their pros and cons

Huntr

Pros:

  • Uses online database

  • Uses kanban board for drag and drop management

Cons:

  • Cannot use CLI for interactions with the system

  • Cannot use without internet connection

  • Cannot use without signing up for an account

  • Cannot get filtered list, the whole board is always shown and can be disorganised

  • Cannot directly get reminders for deadlines, must add a new task

Excel

Pros:

  • Free for NUS students

  • Allows the user to define what to include

  • Allows the user to use it offline

Cons:

  • Does not use CLI for interactions with the system

  • Cannot easily go straight to managing internship applications, steep learning curve

  • Can get messy quickly, no inbuilt filter and archive functions

  • Does not include inbuilt statistics and reminder functions