417 LAB ACTIVITY 10: Designing Reports and entering them into System Architect

WHY:

This activity is designed to help you learn how to design reports. To do this you use a printer spacing chart and either a spreadsheet program or the Screen Painter function in System Architect. This function lets you produce prototypes of the online reports your application will generate. You will be designing a couple of reports from your project in the lab this week and will do more of them as you develop milestone 9. This milestone will mark the beginning design for your project prototype.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

  1. Discover how to prepare a report design using a printer spacing chart.
  2. Discover how to prototype reports using a spreadsheet or Systems Architect.

PERFORMANCE CRITERIA:

  1. Quality of the answers to the Critical Thinking Questions.
  2. Ability to use the skills learned in this lab to successfully complete your project.

RESOURCES:

  1. Chapter 13, Systems Analysis and Design Methods
  2. Activity 19.
  3. 60 minutes

PLAN:

  1. Choose roles if you have not already done so.

  2. Choose one detailed report with a repeated group from your project. Design the layout of the report on a printer spacing chart (c.f., Activity 19). Also, choose a query response and sketch how the screen handling this response will look.

  3. Make sure that you have entered the report and query response as data flows in your systems or design unit diagrams. You must define the attributes in each data flow as either elem or struct items, filling in the definition screens for them from the printer spacing chart or sketch. Note that since this is a report it does not have to be normalized.

  4. Prepare a prototype of the detailed report in Quattro Pro or Excel. Take full advantage of the spreadsheet's ability to compute totals and averages and plot graphs. Use sample data to populate the report. You will demonstrate this report in your final presentation.

  5. Open up a graphics screen in System Architect and enter a prototype of your query response. Note that most queries require the user to specify some information about what they want to know, and then the computer provides the information on the same screen. Use appropriate GUI objects and provide sufficient information on screen that the user knows what to do and when he has made a mistake.

MODEL:

See model from Activity 19.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS:

  1. Which reports will you use to complete milestone 9?

  2. Which queries are likely to be the most common ones that users of your system will make?

  3. Why is input screen design so much more complicated than query or report design? Why are the editing specifications so much more important in an input screen design?

  4. What did your team have most difficulty with in this lab? Give a clear explanation of how to overcome this difficulty.

SKILL EXERCISES:

  1. Choose a second report and/or query from your project, design and enter it into a spreadsheet or System Architect.
CPSC 417 Lab Activity 10 -- Revised 11/21/98

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