I'm a Jr. in college and I'm in some clubs. This year the school has decided to make every club use a web site to track community service, attendance, etc.. The issue with this is the web site sucks. The way we were suppose to go about doing this was to swipe our student id cards and either be connected to the internet and have the website recognize it or have the card save all the id swipes into a notepad and upload them to the site. Well neither of them work and we have even talked to the people in charge. The thing is it is still in beta testing, so ... yea. I've been thinking of writing a program to do this for my club at least. It won't help with the issue of the site, but the club I'm in was looking of doing this at the beginning of the year any way to keep better records and then we found out this info about the website, but right now that isn't working.
So I was thinking of writing a program that could handle the task until the website was up and running at least. What I would need to do would be able to have it handle card swipes ( magnetic card reader hooked up by usb port) and find that person and update the information for that person. For example say 343224232 swiped their card for a regular meeting the program would go find that person and increment the total meeting field by 1 and type of meeting by 1. The program would keep track of student ids, last name, first name, dues (payed or not), total (everything on with the word total), total meetings, total executive meetings, total community service, and total fundraiser. Also would need to be able to look at all of the info (executive committee only) and to be able to look at only specific parts for example who hasn't payed their dues or who had attended the most meetings all year long.
Right now I'm thinking about using a database for this. I'm just starting to take a database mang. class so I don't know how hard this would be, but right now thinking of using the database to store the data and can use sql statement to get what we need from the table such as who hasn't payed dues yet. The only thing I don't know would be able the card reader (swipe card at meeting to login attendance). I have been told that I could write a java or c++ program and connect to a database before in one of my classes, but I don't know how all of that would work.
What do you guys think about this. If you unclear about a part of this please ask.
Thanks for the help.
Sincerely yours;
jdm
