Farm Dashboard Prototype

Author: Eric Latham

Email: ericoliverlatham@gmail.com

Description

I initially developed this program as a team leader for a final project in a software engineering course taught by Dr. Ramaraju Rudraraju at UAB with the help of Tahseen Robbani, Wesley Hataway, Daniel Swinney, and Hardik Patel.

This program is a prototype for a farmer utility application built with JavaFX as an exercise in using design patterns such as entity-control-boundary, composite, visitor, and adapter.

Classes

Entity Classes

• ItemComponent class (composite, pro-transparency)
  • Item class
  • ItemContainer class
• ItemComponentVisitor class
  • AggregatePurchasePriceVisitor class
  • AggregateMarketValueVisitor class
• AnimatedDroneInterface class
  • AnimatedDrone class
  • TelloDroneAdapter class (adapts TelloDrone to AnimatedDrone)
• TelloDrone class (provided by Seth)

Boundary Classes

• Dashboard class (main)

Control Classes

• DashboardController class

Other Classes

All classes other than TelloDroneAdapter in the physical drone module were provided by Seth Lewis from his drone library in order for the adapter design pattern to be completed.

Class Diagram

Features

Farm Items Tree View

I used a TreeView object to allow the user to add, edit, and remove Items and ItemContainers from the Farm Map.

Farm Map

I used a Group object to contain and display the shape of each Item and ItemContainer, as well as the drone icon that is used in the drone animation.

Drone Animation

I used an ImageView object to display the drone icon in the farm map and SequentialTransition objects to animate the drone icon for two different flight simulations:

• Item/ItemContainer visits
• full farm scans

Note that the drone animation feature is intended to mirror what a real drone would do on a real farm if commanded by the TelloDroneAdapter class. However, the TelloDroneAdapter is untested on real drones and currently only exists for simulation purposes.

Automatic Save/Load

Description

I implemented a bonus feature that does the following things:

• automatically saves the root ItemContainer of the Dashboard every time a component is added, updated, or deleted
• automatically loads the previous saved root ItemContainer when the Dashboard is re-opened

This feature allows the Dashboard to "remember" its previous state so that the user does not have to recreate all of the desired farm items each time they run the application.

Implementation

To implement this feature, I added static methods in the ItemContainer class for saving and loading ItemContainer objects via JSON serialization and deserialization.

public static void saveJSON(ItemContainer itemContainer, String filePath);

I used the saveJSON method in the DashboardController class to save the root ItemContainer as a JSON string in a file named rootItemContainer.json whenever changes were made by the user.

public static ItemContainer loadJSON(String filePath);

I used the loadJSON method in the DashboardController class to load the previous root ItemContainer (saved as a JSON string in rootItemContainer.json by saveJSON) whenever the Dashboard and DashboardController objects are initialized (which is whenever the application starts).

In both saveJSON and loadJSON, I leveraged the power of the Gson library to serialize and deserialize ItemComponent objects to/from JSON. Gson is a popular tool used for Java object-JSON serialization and deserialization, and I found it easy to use, especially with the help of its excellent documentation.

Also, I added the required Gson jars as dependencies in the project so that there would be no need to import Gson manually when building and running the project.

How To Run

(assuming you have Eclipse IDE and Java JDK 8 installed)

• clone this repository into farm-dashboard-prototype
• open Eclipse
• select File -> Import -> Existing Projects into Workspace -> Next -> Browse
• locate the cloned farm-dashboard-prototype directory in the filesystem dialogue and select to open it
• select Finish
• click the green play button labeled "Run" on the upper icon bar