Description
The goal of this project was to investigate the limitations of current Business Intelligence System (BI System) which was needed to re-design its architecture and embed two new modules. These two modules were named as Survey Form and Statistics Report.
IT 11 055
Examensarbete 30 hp
July 2011
Design and Implementation of
Business Intelligence Systems
Tanvir Ahmad
Institutionen för informationsteknologi
Department of Information Technology
Teknisk- naturvetenskaplig fakultet
UTH-enheten
Besöksadress:
Ångströmlaboratoriet
Lägerhyddsvägen 1
Hus 4, Plan 0
Postadress:
Box 536
751 21 Uppsala
Telefon:
018 – 471 30 03
Telefax:
018 – 471 30 00
Hemsida:
http://www.teknat.uu.se/student
Abstract
Design and Implementation of Business Intelligence
Systems
Tanvir Ahmad
The goal of this project was to investigate the limitations of current Business
Intelligence System (BI System) which was needed to re-design its architecture and
embed two new modules. These two modules were named as Survey Form and
Statistics Report.
The survey form has a very dynamic behavior, for example the administrator can
generate different types of surveys instantly by drag drop quick functionality of the
interface and he can also send that surveys to the users. The user will give the
answers of survey questions and send them back to the management of the company
where survey form modules helped them to analyze the answers in the form of
graphs. This survey form is also providing five different types of scheduling system
where administrator can schedule their surveys in five different ways like Once,
weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly.
Statistics module has different behaviors. It implemented four different types of
reports which are inter-related with each other. These four reports were named as
financial report, human resource report, project overview and company overview.
The finance report was responsible that it will show the revenue amount and source,
from where the company generated this revenue. The second report was belonged
to human resource department which was responsible for generating the overall
situation of the employees and their projects. For example how many are on holidays,
idle, working and going to be free soon. The third report was representing the
projects overview of all the projects. This report is responsible for checking the
status of all projects and show them in bar char who will show the management that
how many projects are completed, going to start or delay and going to finish soon.
The fourth and final report was responsible for generating report for the overall
company status.
This project has been completed successfully. The design, architecture and,
implementation of intelligent Survey Form and Statics modules have been
implemented and working successfully.
Tryckt av: Reprocentralen ITC
IT 11 055
Examinator: Anders Jansson
Ämnesgranskare: Justin Pearson
Handledare: Charlie Hansson
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Acknowledgment
I would like to say thanks to those who helped me in this thesis. My supervisor Charlie
Hansson encouraged me throughout this thesis. He helped me a lot to understand this project
and enabled me to complete this project within the time limit.
Secondly, I am indebted to my colleagues Mattias Fliesberg, and Erik Nahkala who has
helped me a lot in solving technical issues. This thesis would not have been possible without
their help.
Finally, I would like to show my gratitude to everyone who has helped me to complete this
project.
Tanvir Ahmad
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Contents
Contents
1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 8
1.1 Problem Description................................................................................................................. 8
1.2 Aim.......................................................................................................................................... 9
1.2.1 Survey Form Module ........................................................................................................ 9
1.2.2 Statistics Module .............................................................................................................. 9
1.3 Demarcations ......................................................................................................................... 10
2. Research Approach ........................................................................................................................ 11
3. Working Tools and Technologies ................................................................................................... 12
3.1 Development Environment ..................................................................................................... 12
3.1.1 Programming Language .................................................................................................. 12
3.1.2 Database ......................................................................................................................... 13
3.1.3 Web Server .................................................................................................................... 16
3.1.4 Netbeans IDE 6.9 (Development IDE) ............................................................................ 18
3.1.5 PhpMyAdmin (MySQL database management tool) ....................................................... 18
3.1.6 Web Framework ............................................................................................................. 19
3.1.7 HTML5 (Extensible Hypertext Markup Lanauge) ........................................................... 21
3.1.8 CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet) ........................................................................................ 21
3.1.9 jQuery ............................................................................................................................ 21
3.1.10 ORM (Object Relation Mapping) .................................................................................... 21
4. Project Background ....................................................................................................................... 23
4.1 Thumb Expression.............................................................................................................. 24
4.2 Chat ................................................................................................................................... 24
4.3 Consultants ........................................................................................................................ 25
4.4 Clients and Projects ............................................................................................................ 25
4.5 Finance .............................................................................................................................. 25
4.6 Time Reports...................................................................................................................... 25
4.7 Print Reports ...................................................................................................................... 25
4.8 Statistics ............................................................................................................................. 26
4.9 Overview ........................................................................................................................... 26
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5. Design ........................................................................................................................................... 27
5.1 New architecture .................................................................................................................... 27
5.2 New BI System ...................................................................................................................... 28
5.3 Module Architecture .............................................................................................................. 30
6 Implementation .............................................................................................................................. 32
6.1 Survey Form ................................................................................................................................ 33
6.1.1 Administration Section of the Survey Form ........................................................................... 33
6.1.2 Scheduler ....................................................................................................................... 40
6.1.3 User Survey Form .......................................................................................................... 41
6.1.4 Results of the Survey form ............................................................................................. 43
6.2 Statistics................................................................................................................................. 45
6.2.1 Financial Report ............................................................................................................. 46
6.2.2 Human Resource (HR) Report ........................................................................................ 47
6.2.3 Project Overview ............................................................................................................ 47
6.2.4 Company Overview ........................................................................................................ 48
7 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 49
8 Summary of Contribution .............................................................................................................. 49
9 Future Suggestions ........................................................................................................................ 49
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List of Figures
Figure 1 Comparison between PHP, .Net and Java ................................................................................. 13
Figure 2: Comparison of Databases ....................................................................................................... 15
Figure 3: Comparison of Apache and IIS ............................................................................................... 17
Figure 4: Comparison of CodeIgnitor and Symfony ............................................................................... 20
Figure 5: Old architecture ...................................................................................................................... 23
Figure 6: New System Architecture ....................................................................................................... 27
Figure 7: New BI System detailed architecture ...................................................................................... 29
Figure 8: Module architecture ................................................................................................................ 31
Figure 9: General picture of new modules .............................................................................................. 32
Figure 10: Survey Form database schema .............................................................................................. 33
Figure 11: User Section of Survey Form ................................................................................................ 34
Figure 12: Group List ............................................................................................................................ 36
Figure 13: Template categories .............................................................................................................. 38
Figure 14: Survey Form layout .............................................................................................................. 39
Figure 15: Life cycle of the Survey Form ............................................................................................... 40
Figure 16: One year time period frequency ............................................................................................ 41
Figure 17: User Survey Form................................................................................................................. 42
Figure 18: Results of the Survey Form ................................................................................................... 44
Figure 19: Survey Form results .............................................................................................................. 44
Figure 20: Statistics Module Architecture .............................................................................................. 45
Figure 21: The financial report ............................................................................................................... 46
Figure 22: Human resource report ......................................................................................................... 47
Figure 23: The Project Overview ........................................................................................................... 47
Figure 24: The Company Overview ........................................................................................................ 48
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1. Introduction
Business Intelligence Systems (BI) aims to gather in depth information from the company
data and to analyze that data using different types of computer techniques and plotting which
results in different types of graphs that facilitate the company in the future decisions [1]. The
Business intelligence term was introduced by Hand Peter Luhn (Research at international
business management, IBM) and he defined it as a ”.... ability to apprehend the
interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal”
[2]. The BI Systems were evolved from the decision support systems that were developed in
the 1960s and continued till late 1980s. According to the Howard Dresner the term Business
Intelligence was the “.concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using
face-based support system“[3]. The BI Systems produced results from large chunks of data
that are stored in data warehouses or data mart. On the other hand it is not necessary that
every system that gets data from data warehouse is a BI system. Forrester defines the BI
system as: “Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and
technologies that transforms the raw data into meaningful and useful information. It allows
business users to make informed business decisions with real-time data that can put a
company ahead of its competitors“[4]. The BI Systems offered different types of reports
which provide facility in better decision making. It gathers information from big database and
analyzed them and presents in different types of reports (e.g. tabular, charts, graphs etc.).
These reports provide different types of statistics such as past and present situation of the
company that could help the top management in the better decision making.
1.1 Problem Description
This project was conducted in an Information technology (IT) company (ABC) that provides
solutions to different companies in Sweden. The company was using the BI system and they
figured out that the current BI system has a lot of problems. First the present architecture of a
system did not have a support for integration of new modules because they were not
following any authentic pattern like Model View Controller (MVC) model or Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA). Second the HTML pages were used to process most of the data
on their local machines that slow down the local machine because the resources were already
occupied by the already running programs on that machine. These two problems raised
number of other issues that are as follows.
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? Re-design the architecture of the system
? Minimize Ajax requests
? Remove DOM Objects and use proper HTML templates.
They really need to redesign the architecture of the current BI system because it does not
have well structured architecture where they can integrate new modules in the future. Second
they want to minimize the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) requests because the
HTML pages of system were populating through Ajax requests that slow down the machines
performance. Third all Ajax requests response was coming in JavaScript object notation
(JSON) objects array which have huge size of data. They were using JavaScript language to
manipulate the JSON objects array for creation of Document Object Model (DOM) objects in
their HTML pages and that heavy the operations on pages, all these actions were affecting the
performance of HTML pages and working machine as well.
1.2 Aim
The objective of my work was to re-design the architecture of old BI system so that it
provides the facility to integrate new modules and to handle the number of issues that they
had in the old BI system. Furthermore I was liable to build two new modules. Those two
modules were Survey Form and Statistics reports.
1.2.1 Survey Form Module
The survey form module was required for consultants and clients of the company. Their
consultants often work at customer work place and they want to keep track of all the
information and to keep in touch with them. Through the survey form module the company
can ask different types of questions about their working environment and stress of the job etc.
and vice versa with the clients about consultants and progress of the projects. The survey
form module generates the survey forms that will assign to the specific groups of users and
each form was available for a specific period of time. The survey form will helps to get useful
information from the clients and consultants. Later that information facilitates the higher
authority to compare the previously received data with current data. It helps to analyze the
satisfaction level of the consultants and clients about the company or the project itself.
1.2.2 Statistics Module
Statistics module had aim to provide four different types of reports which were called
financial, human resource, project overview and company overview. Every report will
generate the important statistics of the company.
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They did not have any specific way to calculate the company revenue, cost, and salaries of
the employees within a specific period of time that is why they wanted such as system from
where they can generate full report about the company financial situation.
Second report was belongs to human resource department of the company which was
responsible to generate a report that show them that how many consultants worked at how
many projects, which consultant was difficult to sell in market and which one was the best
resource for the company.
Third report was belongs to projects of the company. The management of the company
wanted to know that how many projects they had done within a specific period of time and
how many they completed within a dead line and after the deadline. This report was
responsible to show them that how many projects they have completed before dead line and
which project was delayed and which one is going to complete soon. All these results will be
representing in the form of pie chart.
Fourth and final report was belongs to company overview. It means that they wanted to see
full overview of the company. How the company business is going? Is it growing fast? Or is
there any chance to get loss in some projects. Above three reports already generate a financial
condition of the company, projects of the company and human resource of the company. By
using these three reports I can easily generate a report from where they can see the complete
and present situation of the company.
1.3 Demarcations
Typically the BI systems are too complex and have a big domain. So it was difficult to
research on all the domains of the BI system. Due to limited resources available at the
company that restricted me to only design and implement the survey form module, Statistics
module and try to improve the efficiency of the old BI system by re-structuring the previous
architecture of the system.
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2. Research Approach
Research is defined as “…. a systematic process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting
information in order to increase our understanding of the phenomenon we are interested in or
concerned of” (Leedy and Ormrod, 2005). Research could be performed in two ways. One
way is to enhance the knowledge within the existing knowledge and the other is to generate a
new knowledge (Gliner and Morgan, 2000 pp. 5). This thesis follows the first way that is to
enhance and improve the functionality within the existing BI systems. In order to enhance
and improve the knowledge I followed Ralph Kimball (2008) method which proposed two
different way of gathering requirements for the BI systems. He described that “business users
and their requirements impact nearly every decision made throughout the design and
implementation of a DW/BI system. The business requirements sit at the center of the
business core and are related to all aspects of the daily business processes” [5]. There are two
ways of gathering information are conducting different types of interviews and facilitated
sessions. I had chosen the first way that is to conduct different types of interviews for that I
had conducted both formal and informal interviews with five different set of users. Both
formal and informal ways were used in order to avoid biases that each method inherent
(Interaction Design- Beyond human computer interaction, 2007, p.290). Formal interview
contains set of questions that were asked to Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief
Financial Officer, Sales Manager and Education Manager. Informal interview was also
conducted with those users in which different dialogues, chat, meetings, phones and emails
were held. In both formal and informal, the design of new system was shown to those users in
order to collect their feedbacks.
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3. Working Tools and Technologies
The BI systems are unique because every BI system is based on the specific business logic
and it creates specific intelligent reports for the company. Therefore I selected some most
popular and widely used software from all over the world which helped me to develop this
system. I have discussed every software and tool with respect to its needs and functionality in
the following:
3.1 Development Environment
I was providing web based solution for the BI System. Therefore in order to choose the best
development environment was not an easy task because there were a lot of options available
for web. Since my focus was providing cheap, efficient and scalable solution for this project.
Therefore I selected the best tool and software after the comparisons of their competitors. In
the following section I have different comparisons of the web technologies with nearest
competitors where you can see that how I choose my tools for this project and why?
3.1.1 Programming Language
There were many programming languages available for web but three of them were very
popular in software industry. PHP, .Net and Java were the most important languages for web
and each of them has own properties, advantages and disadvantages according to the specific
requirements of the projects. I searched on the Internet “Which language is better for web?” I
found hundreds of articles who gave answer about this question but most of the articles were
biased because most of the authors were trying to promote their own language over the
others. So I am sure all of these languages we can use for big projects but when and where we
can use these languages? It is a big question mark today.
PHP and Java are open source languages but .Net is developed by Microsoft. .Net has huge
cost for running big projects and small projects. Therefore I had a discussion with the
company before starting of this project that how much budget they have for this project. They
said to me that they do not want to spend money for purchasing tools. They suggest me to
choose tools from open source directory which helped us to minimize the cost of this project.
This option did not allow me to choose .Net. Now I have two options PHP and Java.
Both PHP and java were powerful languages for websites but I had found one problem on
Internet when I was searching “which language is better?” Java seemed like a web language
for corporate sector and PHP used by peoples who were running their own websites.
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Let me discuss which language provided me cheap solution because I was looking for cheap
solution. I checked that hosting server of Java websites was very expensive and these were
belongs to private industries. Other problem with Java was that its project configuration
required more time, development process was slow because it takes a lot time during
compiling and bug fixing. When I looked at PHP and compare with Java it had a lot of
advantages for me. For example its hosting servers were very cheap and it was very popular
for medium scale projects. Development process was very fast because very rich IDE
available for PHP there developers can manage enterprise level of projects very easily.
Finally I choose a PHP as web language for my project.
Comparison of PHP, .NET and Java
Area PHP .NET Java
License Free Not Free Free
Support Free Free Free
Platforms Multiple Windows Only Multiple
Hosting Cheap Expensive Expensive
Security Very Good Bad Good
Performance Very Good Require expensive hardware Require substantial
configuration and expensive
hardware
Scalability Very Well Can be difficult to scale Good
Frameworks Many good frameworks
available
Only one standard Framework Only one standard Framework
Configuration Extremely easy Not very flexible Flexible
Compatibility Backward Compatibility Often break functionalities So many problem between old
and new versions
Figure 1 Comparison between PHP, .Net and Java
3.1.2 Database
Database is a type of software where we can store information in an organized form. There
are two types of popular database are available one is called relational database and other is
called NoSQL database. We can use relational database where we know that our objects have
fixed number of properties and we can define their schema very easily in our database. But
where we will not be sure about our objects properties then there we shall use a schema free
database.
In my case I found that I had fixed number of properties of my objects and I can easily define
their schema in relational database. After realizing this I decided that I will use relational
database instead of schema free database.
After a little effort I found that there are many popular databases that I can use in my project.
MS SQL Database, Oracle Database and MySQL were the most famous ones but I had to
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choose one of them to full fill my project requirements. Let me start to dig into one by one
and find out that what type of functionalities they had, how easy to use them, How much help
was available from community and which one was the most fits with my requirements?
MS SQL
MS SQL was a relational database produced and marked by Microsoft. We can interact with
database by two query languages T-SQL and ANSI SQL. Microsoft developed this by using
three famous computer languages C, C++ and C#. MS SQL only supports Windows platform
therefore users were bound to use Windows Server platform. Although it provided all
functionalities that we required from a relational database. For example it had strong support
of query language, procedures, triggers and views. It also had a strong community help from
many online forums. Microsoft also providing huge and well documented help in the form of
MSDN library there every developer can find every type of help very easily. Next thing to
find out that does it belongs to open source community? Do I need to buy a license? If I shall
buy a license then how much money I need to pay? I figured out that Microsoft had its
license ownership and if I want to use this database then I need to buy a license which was
very costly. The company does not want to spend money for buying software. Finally I skip
this option and start searching for Oracle database.
Oracle
Oracle database was a relational database produced and marked by Oracle Corporation.
Commonly Oracle database called as simply Oracle. Oracle database developed in two
famous languages C and C++ which supports on all types of platforms like UNIX, Linux,
Windows and MAC. That is why it can also run on all these platforms which were much
better choice than MS SQL. SQL was the main language for communication with Oracle
which supports all types of CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations. It also has
support for writing procedures, triggers and views. Oracle was a big database and it was very
popular among corporate sector where they had very highly and secured application. For
example in banks, ATM machines, telecommunications companies, Airline control database
etc. but it was also use in enterprise level applications where companies were running payroll
systems, attendance system of employees.
Oracle was also providing support for their customers but their customer needs to buy a
premium package for getting different types of support. They were providing online
documentation for everyone. Finally let me check out that do I need to buy a license if I want
to use in my project. I found that Oracle had huge cost for licensing of this database. I was
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really interested to use this database but due to costs and limited amount of help I also skip
this database from my list and start searching for MySQL.
MySQL
MySQL was a relational database developed by Swedish company MySQL AB but later on it
owned by Oracle Corporation. MySQL developed in two famous languages C and C++
which supports on all types of platforms like UNIX, Linux, Windows and MAC. MySQL had
also support on all these platforms where these languages have. That is why I can say that it
gives me more independence of choosing database for my project. Like the other relational
databases MySQL was also using SQL language for CRUD operations on database tables and
it had also support for writing procedures, triggers, functions and views. MySQL belongs to
open source community and most of the open source software that requires full featured
database management system was also using MySQL.
MySQL was very popular choice of database for web applications and 70% of web
applications were using this database. Web applications which were using MySQL database:
Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and phpBB. Due to huge social
network of MySQL community it had a lot support from users in the form of discussion
forums, articles, books, tutorials and web seminars. MySQL was also providing online well-
structured documentation which was very helpful and easy to understand. The main
advantage for everyone was that it had not license cost and providing freedom to use it under
General Public License. This was the only open source database which was competing with
all other competitors like MS SQL and Oracle.
Comparisons of Databases
Feature MySQL MS SQL Oracle database
Platforms UNIX, Linux, Windows,
MAC
Windows UNIX, Linux, Windows,
MAC
License Free Not free Not free
Installation Very easy Hard Medium
Drivers Yes Yes Yes
Graphical
Interface
Yes - not good Yes – very good Yes - good
Triggers Yes Yes Yes
Procedures Yes Yes Yes
Scalability Yes Yes – not easy Yes
Public help Yes – very good Yes – very good Yes – not good
SQL Yes Yes Yes
Figure 2: Comparison of Databases
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After analyzing of these three databases I found that MySQL was the only database that fits
with my project requirements. All databases were very good but the problem was that they
were costly and not popular for web application. MySQL provided me open source freedom
and all time support as well. MySQL is free with all these features that become factor of
minimizing the cost of the ownership. That is why most of the websites are migrating towards
this database. It also comes with LAMP package so it is highly configure in this distribution
and this is one of the best database that mostly use with PHP and Apache.
3.1.3 Web Server
Web server is software that provides help to get access of contents through Internet. Most of
the web servers are use by hosting companies for managing web applications. The web server
can deliver HTML pages and other documents like style sheets, JavaScript, images,
documents etc. to the client browser. Mostly Web browsers are acting as a client and sending
request in the form HTTP request and receive a response as an HTML page. In this world
there are many web servers available but I will discuss only two because these two are very
popular among web industry. These two web servers are Internet Information Service (IIS)
and Apache.
Internet Information Service (IIS)
IIS was a web server which was developed by Microsoft. It worked only on Windows
platform that is why it integrates IIS, ASP.NET, Windows communication Foundation, and
Window SharePoint Service together. IIS was the second most popular web server after
Apache. 20% of websites were running on IIS server. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS,
SMTP, and NNTP types of requests. So it was very good for web application. I got one
problem that it supports only ASP.Net technology but I was using PHP which did not have
support with IIS. Finally I skipped this option and moved forward to the Apache.
Apache
Apache server was a computer program that hosts different programs, directories, and files.
Apache makes these files accessible to the Internet, intranet and local host users by HTTP
requests. Apache renders the entire HTML and PHP files and sends them to the user browser.
The Apache server was different from its competitors for example Microsoft IIS (Internet
Information Server). Why was it different? Because it was free, open source and its code
available for view and modify. The Apache was also coming with different packages for
different platforms like WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) for windows, LAMP
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) for Linux and MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) for
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Mac OS but the most popular package was LAMP and still it was getting more and more
popularity.
Apache was a web server and almost 60% of web sites were using it. It was widely used all
over the world because of open source and many other interesting features like it had many
implemented and compiled modules which extend the functionality of its core from server
side programming languages to authentication modules. It supports many languages but most
commonly used in PHP, Python, Perl and TCL. The most popular authentication mod was
mod_ssl [7].
Comparison of Apache and IIS
Figure 3: Comparison of Apache and IIS
As you can see in figure 5 that Apache and IIS has competition but for the Apache is a win-
win situation. As graph shows that in 2007 Apache popularity get down and Microsoft IIS get
some popularity but again from 2010 Apache is getting more and more popular. A reason is
that Apache is open source and it supports on every types of platforms like UNIX, Linux,
Windows and MAC. That is why hosting companies do not need to buy a license and they are
providing cheap hosting services to the customers.
Selection of Web Server
After analyzing the both web servers I found that Apache was the best web server for my
project because it had all functionalities that I needed in my project. For example, it was open
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source, very well integration with PHP and MySQL, installation was very easy on all
platforms. Apache was available as part of LAMP distribution for Linux. This distribution
makes very easy for setting up new web server by using Linux environment which was also
open source and free.
Now I have all mandatory components for my project environment where I can start my
project development. I setup my web server on Ubuntu which was Linux based operating
system. I installed Apache2, MySQL 5.0, and PHP 3.3.2 which provided me full featured
web server where I can host my web application and make my all files public.
Next step was to start development but before this I need some more tools which will provide
me help during my development period. For example: Netbeans, Mercurial, PhpMyAdmin,
ORM (Object Relation Mapping), Ant and LiqueBase. All these tools I selected for project
management without any reason.
In the following headings I have short description of all these tools.
3.1.4 Netbeans IDE 6.9 (Development IDE)
Netbeans had lot of features that is why I used it in my project. (For example, it had built in
support for the PHP advance features, Ant, Mercurial, and other features). It was an open
source; free under Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and GPL
version 2 licenses [22]. It provided help to manage my project folders and files very easily.
The PHP plug-in provided an editor for writing well-structured code and highlight the
specific block of code. It had also support for intelligently detecting already defined
variables, classes and its methods. That is why it was one of the best IDE in the software
development industry.
3.1.5 PhpMyAdmin (MySQL database management tool)
PhpMyAdmin was a free and open source software tool written in PHP, intended to handle
the administration of MySQL over the web. PhpMyAdmin supports a wide range of
operations with MySQL. The most frequently used operations are supported by the users
interface (managing databases, tables, fields, relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc.).
While you still have the ability to directly execute any SQL statement [10]. It provided the
graphics interface for MySQL database to perform different types of operation. It makes
developer life easy otherwise it was very difficult to run all types of commands from the
command prompt.
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3.1.6 Web Framework
There are many web frameworks available on Internet and each one has own ideology but the
common thing is that all are following the MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture.
Basically different frameworks are providing different design of architectures. Most of the
web frameworks that belong to PHP technology are open source and give more choice to the
developers that they can choose framework according to their project needs. I choose two
frameworks that can meet with my project requirements. These frameworks are CodeIgnitor
and Symfony. Let me discuss one by one and then I will choose one of them for my project.
CodeIgnitor
CodeIgnitor was an open source and powerful PHP framework that was specially design for
small web application. It was providing many advantages to the developers who wanted to
meet their deadlines and deliver their projects stable and secure to their clients. For example:
? It was providing exceptional speed.
? Very easy to integrate and start new project on pre build architecture.
? It did not force to developer for following specific coding standards.
? It supports template language but does not force to the programmer to use it.
? Very easy to follow the MVC standards.
? There is no extra configuration settings means almost zero configuration settings.
Symfony
Symfony was also open source and very popular framework regarding PHP technology. It
was designed by Sensio Labs Germany. Symfony specially designed for small and large
scale web applications. They had developed many libraries that developers need during
development of any type of project. Symfony structure allowed developers to work
effectively and efficiently on the most complex types of problems. If developers follow their
instructions carefully then they will guarantees the stability, maintainability and
upgradeability of the project. Symfony was also providing many advantages to the developers
who wanted to deliver their projects on time.
? Its performance very fast and optimization was very easy.
? Very flexible to integrate new application in project.
? Its design provides facility that we can easily expand our project functionality.
? Stable and sustainable.
? It provides fully featured template engine.
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? It provides advance way of MVC model.
? It was not easy to configure but they explain step by step in detail.
Comparison of CodeIgnitor and Symfony
Feature Symfony CodeIgnitor
PHP4 No Yes
PHP5 Yes Yes
MVC Yes Yes
Modules Yes Yes
ORM Yes Yes – but very basic
Authentication Yes No
Cache Yes No
Validator Yes Yes
Ajax Yes Yes
License MIT Apache/BSD
Figure 4: Comparison of CodeIgnitor and Symfony
Selection of web framework
After looked into CodeIgnitor I found that it was very good for small applications where we
had small number of users, reasonable traffic and we did not need many technologies to
integrate in one project. So I skip this because in my case application was an enterprise level
and I need to integrate many other technologies as well. If you look at my goal in chapter 1
you will realize that I need a design that helps to the company in order to scale this project in
the future. Other reason is that they want template engine that will generate and render
HTML pages for this project. Finally I decided that Symfony was providing me all such type
of facilities and I can easily use this in my project because it was easy to learn and integrate
into the project environment.
After selection of framework I was about to start development but still I need to decide some
more things for my HTML pages. Which version I will use for HTML, CSS? Which
JavaScript library will I use for calling action of my pages? Why I look on it because there
are many web browsers are available in the market and every browser has own standards of
rendering HTML, CSS tags that is why it is very important if you want to stable your web
pages in every browsers. After a little effort and reading articles on web I learned that most of
the famous browsers were following latest standards of HTML and CSS. Finally I decided
that I will use HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery for my HTML pages.
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3.1.7 HTML5 (Extensible Hypertext Markup Lanauge)
HTML is a basic language for web pages and it is written in the form of elements which are
called tags. Every tag has two types of brackets starting and ending (like <html>). These tags
usually come with pairs (like <head>, </head>). First tag is called starting and second tag is
ending. I figure out that from many years there were no research on these tags but recently
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) did research on it and embedded new features in the
HTML language [21] that called major release of the HTML revision.
3.1.8 CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet)
CSS is primarily designed for separation of layout from the HTML document including font,
colors, table layouts and text styles. I used CSS for presenting look and formation of my web
pages written in a markup language. It is widely used language for styling HTML pages. It
helped me a lot to separate my HTML document presentation, which includes all elements
such as layout, colors, and fonts. This improves my content accessibility. It also becomes
more flexible and controllable on other pages. It enables me to access my formatting styles on
different pages and avoid duplication of my styles.
3.1.9 jQuery
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript library that simplifies the HTML documents
traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development [18].
It is open source and had dual license under MIT and GNU General Public License version 2
[19]. It is very rich application because it is very simple and very powerful in that sense that
we can get required results after writing a few lines of code. For example, I can put drag and
drop functionality on my web pages with it. I found that this library is really useful for
interface programming of web pages. Secondly, it provides me a plug-in that can customize
my HTML components into attractive one like image works, check box, modification of
dropdown interface etc.
3.1.10 ORM (Object Relation Mapping)
Object Relational Mapping (ORM) is a technique used in programming languages when
dealing with databases for translating incompatible data types in relational databases. This
essentially allows us to have a “virtual object database” that can be used from the
programming language [11].
I used PHP Doctrine in my project which was a collection of selected PHP libraries that
focused on the persistence functionalities. “Doctrine was an Object Relational Mapper
(ORM) for PHP 5.2.3+ that sits on top of the powerful Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL).
22
One of its key features was the option to write database queries in a proprietary object
oriented SQL dialect called Doctrine Query Language (DQL), inspired by Hibernates HQL.
This provided a powerful alternative to developers for SQL maintaining without requiring
unnecessary code duplication” [12].
23
4. Project Background
The BI System was developed by the company in 2006. Till now they had released two
versions of the system but now they are planning to add new functionalities to improve the
efficiency of the system.
The BI System offers many services to the consultants of the company. These consultants are
highly qualified professionals and among of these consultants each of them has different
types of expertise in different areas of the computer science. As the time is progressing and
everyone is getting more and more experience in his profession. The company wants to
manage information of all the consultants in a better way. They were using a system to
manage all these information but its architecture was as follows in figure 5:
Figure 5: Old architecture
BI
System
Thumbs
Chat
Consultants
Client and
Projects
Finance
Time
Reports
Statistics
Overview
Documents
24
The old BI System was providing seven different types of services which were as follows
? Thumb Expression
? Chat
? Consultants
? Clients and Projects
? Finance
? Time Reports
? Statistics
? Overview
? Documents
4.1 Thumb Expression
Thumbs was very interesting feature in the old BI System because whenever any consultant
was logged-in, the system instantly prompts the user with six different shapes of thumbs and
asked “how do you feel today?” the user then selects a thumb sign according to his current
mood and situation of the project. The most important thing was that it was taking only one
or two seconds and the user got into his account.
Figure 6: Thumb Expression
The company obtained a lot of help from this feature. (e.g. they can analyze the consultants
health, work load and they can identify the consultants who were not feeling good or maybe
they were in work pressure. So the company can easily identify their problems and fix them
as soon as possible.
4.2 Chat
In this module all consultants can communicate with each other via text messages. The
consultants could only post text messages on the discussion board because it was common for
everyone and there were no separate chat system. Due to this problem they were using Skype
for internal communication.
25
4.3 Consultants
There were two types of consultants list: one was “Active” and the other was “Passive”. The
active consultants were those who were currently working and the passive were those who
were not working currently and the company was trying to sell them in the market. The
company can easily add new consultants, view, update, and delete already saved consultant
information.
4.4 Clients and Projects
There were two types of clients list one was “Active” and the other was “Passive”. The active
clients were those whose projects were currently going on and the passive clients were those
whose projects had been completed or will start in near future. This module shows client
profiles, their projects and status of each project. It was also showing the complete progress
of the projects. The user can also create new client, view already saved client profiles and
projects.
4.5 Finance
Finance services were assisting the company in the calculation of the consultant salaries
according to per hour rate. It was representing the different properties such as start date, end
date, salary/hour, salary/month, tax rate, average, vacation and part time. It also showed the
list of all consultants and presented their property values in each column.
4.6 Time Reports
This module was helping the project managers to assign total working hours of the newly
created projects to the relative consultants. Each consultant can update their working hours
every day in the calendar. The time report helped them to elaborate how many hours had
been reported by each consultant regarding their project work and how many hours were
remaining. This functionality assisted the consultants to easily report their working hours in
the text box and add it into the calendar by using “drag and drop” functionality.
4.7 Print Reports
This module was generating three types of PDF reports stated as Invoice Generation System,
Salary Specification, and Project Card. In invoice generation report they were creating the
reports against one client by selecting specific period of time. The salary specification type
was generating reports against the salary of every consultant within a specific period of time
and the project card type was generating reports for a specific project. The system itself saved
these reports in server directory because it also displayed the list of all reports so that next
time the user of the system can easily download the already generated reports from the server.
26
4.8 Statistics
This represented the different types of the graph presentation of current year and it also had
options for creating graphs according to the specific period of time. It contains weekly work
load graph where it can be easily analyzed. How work load was divided in each week? It also
contains the graph representation of the thumb expressions. Where the user can see that how
many consultants are logged in every day and what was their feelings, either they were tired
or fresh.
Figure 7: Statistics
4.9 Overview
This module represented the full view of the company in just one click and displayed all the
information of the projects. It was also a short representation of all the projects and their
consultants. (e.g. system can easily calculate status of every project that how many hours
were estimated and what was their starting and ending date. While clicking on any particular
day of the specific project the system pops up with detailed hours graph as shown in figure 8.
This figure presented the three bars: the first bar presents how many hours were estimated at
start. The Second bar presented how many hours have been worked out by the consultants
and the third bar showed that how many hours were remaining to finish this project.
Figure 8: Overview of Project Hour
27
5. Design
The second chapter described that what type of tools I used to build this system and third
chapter describe that what kind of old system was and how was its architecture. Now I will
explain the design of new system and how I used all my tools to build this new system.
5.1 New architecture
The architecture in the figure 9 shows the general structure of this system which contains two
new modules and core of the system. This core will provide the architecture where the
company can integrate new modules very easily in the future. Most of the modern
architectures are following this classical design for large projects. Since my focus was to
develop this system. I divided my solution into three main parts. First I designed core
structure of the system which was based on MVC architecture and other many things that I
will discuss later. Secondly I designed architecture for its new module which was also based
on the MVC architecture.
Figure 6: New System Architecture
The new BI system core is the heart of the system which will receive all requests from user
and forward them to the particular module of the system. For a moment assume that it
New BI
System
Survey
Form
Statistics
28
forwards all requests successfully to the related modules. How it will forward all requests?
That I will describe in next section. The next task was that I have to develop two modules and
integrate with my new system. Every module contained two parts one for administrator and
second for client. The module architecture is based on MVC model. It has one controller that
will handles all request from user and administrator and send them to the related model. The
model will communicate with the database and send the feed back to the controller back.
After getting feedback from model the controller forwards the request to the template engine
which renders the HTML pages and sends them to the browser.
5.2 New BI System
Figure 7 represents the general architecture of the BI system but it is not representing the
detail information about the module. How modules are integrated with this system I will
describe here but structure of modules I will describe in next section.
The web framework provided me great help in order to handle the HTTP request from web
browser. As you can see in figure 7 there are two important part of framework. One is Front
Controller and other is Symfony Kernel. Every HTTP request has two types of objects which
are called Request and Response Objects. These two objects are very simple itself but the
hard part of the application is that what will come in between these two requests. Symfony is
specifically designed for solving this type of problems. Otherwise it is very difficult to handle
the all types of HTTP requests like sending emails, handling form submissions, saving
objects into database, rendering HTML pages and protecting content from hackers. It is also
difficult to manage all types of these requests and keep my code organized and maintainable.
Traditionally if you look on the site building process of each web site then you will see that
there are many URLs defined manually like index.php and contact.php. These URLs create a
huge problem when somebody wants to change its name. Why it has problem? Because it has
definition in different places of website for the navigation purpose therefore it needs to
change its name everywhere that would be time consuming process. Other problem is that if I
will create different PHP libraries then I need to include my all libraries in every file to
maintain the consistency of the code. That would be a difficult and time consuming process
as well. To overcome this problem I introduced front controller in my architecture which
handles all types of request that comes from users. Introducing front controller is much better
solution because it is a single PHP file that will handle all types of request that coming to
your application. This approach solves all traditional problems like changing URL names,
29
defining libraries, configuration settings with database. All these definitions should be in one
file and everybody can change them very easily and in a very less time.
Front controller has only the definition of all types of requests. It has responsibility to
forward these request to the Symfony Kernel which handles these requests and call specific
module controller. We will discuss about module controller in the next section. As you can
see in figure 7 when Front controller gets a request it simply forward that request to the
Kernel. It process the URL filters and send the response back to the kernel. After getting
response back. The kernel call the specific module as shown in figure.
Figure 7: New BI System detailed architecture
/ /statistics /surveyform
Front Controller
Symfony Kernel
Request URL
Controller
Routing
DefaultModule
SurverFormModule
StatisticsModule
NewModule
30
5.3 Module Architecture
All modules of this project have the same MVC architecture as shown in figure 8. MVC is an
architectural pattern and this is used almost in all programming languages. The MVC
architecture helps me to separate my domain logics into different layers. It also helps me to
control the flow of my application request in a good manner. MVC has different types of
flavors but my application has control flow as follows
User makes an interaction with interface through browser and sends a request to the
controller. The controller will handle the request and convert into an appropriate form which
understandable for model layer. The model will take the action against this request and
response back to the controller or directly to the view layer. This view layer will generate a
HTML page against this response and forward to the browser.
In my modules when browser will send a request to the web server then web server will
forward this request to the Front controller of the system which I discussed in 4.2 sections.
Front Controller route this request to the related module of the system where special
controller of the module will handle this request and forward to the model layer. I do not have
simple model layer as mostly we have in the MVC architecture. I have integrated ORM layer
with my model layer which sits between model and database. This ORM layer received a
request from model and generates a query for database. After getting query from ORM the
database generate a result and response back to the model layer. The model has responsibility
to forward this result to the controller. The controller will forward this request to the View
part of this module. The view is also not simple as we have in common MVC architecture. As
the view will get a response from controller it will interact with HTML template engine. This
will generate a HTML page for view and send to the view layer. The view layer just receives
the HTML page and flushes to the web browser.
31
Figure 8: Module architecture
Controller
Model
ORM
Database
View
Browser
Web Server
System core
Response
HTML, CSS,
JavaScript,
images
32
6 Implementation
In the previous section I described how I redesigned all structure of this project. Now in this
section I will discuss that how many modules I suppose to implement and how I implemented
these modules. There were two modules that I supposed to implement for this system. Figure
9 represents the general idea of these new modules. If you look at the Survey Forms at left
side of the BI system then you can see that it has five different types of forms. These types
are representing five different types of scheduling of this survey form which I will discuss in
coming sections. On the right hand side of the BI System you can see statistics module which
is representing four different types of reports. I will discuss in coming sections. What type of
these reports are and how I implemented them.
Figure 9: General picture of new modules
BI System
Forms Statistics
Once Weekly Monthly Quarterly
Financial Report HR Report Project Overview Company Overview
Yearly
33
After getting the requirements, when I was clear enough about my job I started
implementation. I designed a database schema according to my requirements which as
follows in figure 10.
Objects Properties
Category id, name, formid, categorytype (template, form)
CosForm id, name, startdate, enddate, closeable, formtype(once, weekly, monthly, quarterly,
yearly), activationdate, status
FormAverage id, formid, unweighted, weighted, answerdate
FormGroups id, formid, groupid
SurveyForm id, formid, categoryid, questionId, answer, answertype, answertext, weight,
answerdate
GlobalForm id, formid, groupid, userid, usertype(customer, consultant), globalid, viewable,
visitdate, answerdate
UserForm id, userid, formid, answerdate, formtype, stratdate, enddate, visits, visitdate,
activatedate
UserVisits id, userid, formid, visits, visitdate
Group id, name
GroupUser id, groupid, userid, usertype
Question id, question, categoryid, questiontype
Figure 10: Survey Form database schema
When I was ready with my schema I start to create my schema within MySQL database. By
default MySQL has command line interface. By this interface we can run SQL queries one by
one and create a database schema. But Running SQL queries through command line it was
difficult and time consuming. So I used one open source tool PhpMyadmin which provided
me complete interface. From this tool I can perform all types of operations on database very
easily and quickly. Using this tool I create all my tables into database and start
implementation of the survey form module.
6.1 Survey Form
The survey form has two types of interfaces. One for the administration and the other section
is for the users. From administration section the company can create surveys and send them
to the users. From the user section user can answer the survey questions and submit to the
management.
6.1.1 Administration Section of the Survey Form
The administration section provides the dynamic feature for this module. I divided survey
form layout into three columns as shown in figure 11. Left layout of the survey form shows
34
the list of all consultants and clients. Center layout represents the list of all groups of the
users. These groups will be assigned to the survey forms. Last and most right layout provides
the functionality where administrator can create new survey form.
Figure 11: User Section of Survey Form
Let me discuss one by one how I implemented all these functionalities.
Group Users
In the survey form module controller is the responsible of every request that comes from
browser. As controller will receive a request to load a HTML page for create the survey form.
It will call an index method of the controller that will populate list of users, groups of users,
survey forms and list of template categories at bottom section of the survey form.
As controller will receive a request it will call a database service related to particular entity
class and create a connection with database. Because it is using persistent database
connection so I do not need to worry about connection limitations. As it will establish a
connection with database, the controller will send a request to the model for getting list of the
users. The model class will pass the request to the ORM layer which is responsible for
fetching data from database. I used PhpDoctrine ORM layer which is providing me facility
that I can write my queries in the objects form instead of writing traditional SQL queries. The
advantage is that I do not need to handle most of the database security issues myself. The
most popular issue was database injection which is almost crash the application. After
fetching data from database the ORM layer. It sends back the response to the model class. As
model class will receive the data then it will forward the request to the controller where
controller receives the response data and forward to the particular view. View receives this
data and sends to the template engine which will generate a HTML page and forward to the
view class. The view class will display this HTML page to the browser.
Survey Form Layout
Left Layout Center Layout Right layout
35
Form Group
The center layout represents the list of groups. Each group has list of consultants and clients
so controller will call the index method which also follow the same request procedure as I
describe procedure for user list at left layout. Extra feature is that there is create and delete
operations exist for groups. When user will click on create button controller will receive a
request and call a create group method which will send the request to the template engine that
will create a HTM L form and send it to the browser where user will interact this form and
write a name of the group. After writing name of the group, user will submit the group form
and validate the form field with jQuery form validation plug-in. if form is valid then it will
allow the form to send data to the controller. The controller will receive the data and validate
the form field at server side as well for secure validation. If validation will failed then error
message send to the view which will display the message to the user browser. Otherwise
controller will call the database service and establish a persistent connection. After creating a
successful connection with database controller will send the HTML form data to the model.
The model will forward this data to the ORM layer which insert the group name into database
and send response back to the model. If response is true then group name added successfully
otherwise there should be an error message. Whatever the response is, the model will send
this response to the controller and controller will forward this message to the view which will
display the result to the user browser.
36
Figure 12: Group List
After creating a group, now it is time to add consultants and clients in the group from left
layout. I used jQuery multi select plug-in which provides me functionality that I can select
multiple names by mouse click from user list. At once I have selection of users from list, the
next step is just to drag that names and drop into the panel of group that I created before. As I
will drop the names $.ajax() method of jQuery will call and create a JavaScript array of all
user ids and types. As I discussed before there are two types of users, one is consultant and
other is client. After creating the arrays of consultants and clients $.ajax() method will send
the HTTP request to the Rest Controller. I introduced the rest controller for separate the Ajax
requests. The advantage is that it is easy to separate the types of HTTP requests which
provide the flexibility for maintaining the code structure of the controller. After getting the
request the rest controller will call the database service and establish a persistent connection.
When connection with database will be ready, the controller will grab the arrays information
and convert them into PHP arrays. These PHP array has the ids and types of users. The
controller will send these arrays to the model where model forward these arrays to the ORM
37
layer. Now ORM layer will run the SQL query on Group User table and insert the all user ids
and types against this group. After successful insertion into the database of the group users the
controller will receive a response from model and re-load the user page. You can see the HTML
layout in the group user list figure 12.
Template Categories
Template category section is specially designed for those set of questions that most ly use in
the survey forms. The advantage of this section is that the management of the company can
create a set of questions for future use because it is providing functionality to the
management that when they will create a new survey form then they can use these template
categories in the form.
In this section we can add, edit and delete categories. All these actions handle by the rest
controller of the survey form module. When user click on the add category button then it will
call the jQuery method show(). This method will show the HTML form for getting input from
user. As user will write a name of the template category and submit the category form. The
controller will validate the form and check the category name. Is it already exists or not? If it
is already exists then controller will send the message to the user browser that duplicate
category does not allow otherwise controller forward the category name to the model of the
module. The model will send the value to the ORM layer which is responsible for inserting
this value into the category table of database.
You can see in figure 13 that every template category has different type of questions. You
can also add, edit and delete the questions from category. Every question will take the answer
in the form of radio buttons or text area. I will discuss this functionality in the coming
section when I will discuss user interface of the survey form. But in the administration
section whenever we will define the answer we will specify the answer type as well. There is
a radio button against every question type if it is checked then answer type should be text
otherwise it would be choice of radio buttons where user needs to check one radio button
while giving the answer.
For update functionality I used an editable plug-in of jQuery. Why I used this plug-in because
it provides me functionality that I can easily update my category and question text. When
user will click on the category or question edit image button then jQuery calls this plug-in
which replace the text with HTML textbox. In this text box user can easily change text and
click on the update image again. As user will click on the update image, the editable plug-in
38
will call the jQuery method $.ajax() and at the same time it will replace the textbox with
updated text. But at the backend $.ajax() method will send the Ajax request to the rest
controller which will receive the updated text and forward to the model. The model will forward this
request to the ORM layer which will update the text into the database.
I have implemented an interactive layout for the template category section. As you can see in
figure 13 that there is a list of categories which I have designed using CSS. On this list I have
also implemented the jQuery SlideUp() and SlideDown() functionality. When user will click
on the heading of the category SlideDown() methed will open the category section and list
out the questions. The advantage of this functionality is that user can easily manage many
categories within small place of page.
Figure 13: Template categories
Survey Forms
Until now I have discussed three building blocks that I need for creating one survey. These
three building blocks are group users, form groups and template categories. In this section I
will describe the section of survey form layout which will use these three blocks. Here Figure
14 represents the original layout of the survey form administration section. Where user can
create new surveys and send them to the users. Let me explain how this section will work
from top to bottom.
Here we can schedule the survey forms with five different types of time periods. These time
periods are defined as Once, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly. The Once type of
scheduling represents the survey form which will assign to the users for one time. When all
users send the results then system will close the survey form. Other four types of scheduling
represents the survey forms which will be assign to the users at once. After assigning the
survey form, the user will get the survey at start date of the schedule. According to the
schedule type of the survey form the system will automatically calculate the schedule date for
next time. When next schedule date will come the system itself send the same survey form
39
with same set of questions to the same groups of users which have been assigned to the
survey forms before. This phenomenon will continue until the end date arrives. At arriving of
end date the system will close the survey form.
Figure 14: Survey Form layout
Implementation of Survey Forms
In this section I will describe in detail that how I implement the above functionality. When
user will click on the ADD FORM button at top right hand side of the form section, the
show() method of the jQuery will be invoke and show the HTML form. This form consists of
four input fields, Form name, start date, end date, and schedule type of the survey form. The
form name represents the title of the survey form. The start and end date fields represent the
active and closing date of the survey form. The fourth field defines the schedule type of the
survey form. The administrator can create a new survey form very easily by using this form.
He will just define the four fields and submit the form. The controller is responsible for
validation and saving the values into database. The controller of the module will receive the
post request and run the validation process on it. If validation process is passed then
controller will forward the request to the model. Otherwise an error message will be generate
and send back to the user. The model will receive the data and forward to the ORM layer
which will run the insert operation on the database and response to the controller. If response
is positive then it will refresh the page otherwise send the exception. Once the survey form
defines it will provide the HTML panel where administrator can add categories and its
questions. There I have provided two choices for them. First they can use the template
categories as survey form categories. They can get this template category by drag and drop
functionality. Second option is that they can also add categories and questions within a form
panel as well. But template categories are providing quick solution for them because
40
management of the company does not have too much time for creating survey forms therefore
they need to use this functionality. When template category will drop on the survey form
panel then jQuery method $.ajax() receive the template category id and send to the rest
controller which will copy the complete content of the template category and insert all these
contents as a new category. Because I want independent categories in the survey forms
therefore I copy it instead of saving its reference as foreign key. The advantage is that now
they can modify their questions and its categories names. Due to this facility they can use
these template categories in other survey forms as well.
Life cycle of the Survey form
Figure 15: Life cycle of the Survey Form
6.1.2 Scheduler
In order to control the scheduling periods of each survey form I need to implement one
scheduler. The scheduler is the main heart of the survey form. The scheduler divided the
survey form duration into different number of time periods according to the schedule type.
Figure 16 shows that if survey form has type weekly then scheduler will divide the duration
into 52 time periods, similarly monthly survey will be divide into 12 time periods, Quarterly
survey into 4 time periods and yearly survey one time in a year. This survey form duration is
Survey Form
Administrator
Survey Form
Client
Schedular
Results
Weekly
Monthly
Quarterly
Yearly
Send Survey
according to the
schedule
Check
Schedule
41
calculated from start and end date of the survey form which is specified when survey form
created.
Figure 16: One year time period frequency
I have implemented four cron jobs at apache server and tell to the apache that runs these jobs
at the start of every time period. For example the weekly cron job will run on every Sunday
night and send the weekly surveys to the users, similarly the monthly cron job will run on
every last date of the month, the quarterly cron job will run on every last date of the quarter
month of the year and yearly cron job will be run on every last date of the year.
6.1.3 User Survey Form
Before this section I have discussed all about the administration section of the survey form.
How administrator can design new surveys and send them to the users. I think it is a right
time to discuss about user survey form layout that how user will interact with this? How I
implemented? Let me discuss short description of page layout that how user will get this
survey? How user will give answers to the questions and submit them to the company
management.
Figure 17 represents the HTML view of the survey form which has title and list of questions
under different category names. As I discussed in template category section that when
administrator will define a question. He will also specify the types of question input. Is it a
text or choice for user? If you look at figure 17 then you can see that first question has text
type and other questions have choice options for user. All these questions are dynamically
defined at administration section therefore there is no limit of number of questions per
survey. Administrator can define questions as much as he wants. Of course there will be a
problem of listing when administrator will define a huge number of questions and it will also
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Weekly Monthly Quaterly Yearly
Time Periods
42
affect the efficiency of the page. So I discussed this issue with the company. They told me
that they do not have more than 10 questions in any survey. This answer makes me clear that
there will be no problem with number of questions.
Figure 17: User Survey Form
The question with text area allows only 200 characters to the user for giving answer. This
limitation of text bounds the user to write answer short and to the point. The question with
radio buttons has special feature. You can see in figure 17 that except first question all other
questions have two lines of radio buttons. What does it means? Let me explain this with
example. We have an example question “Do you like working environment?” after this
question user will have two lines of radio button and each line has 10 options which are
starting from 1 and ending at 10. Number 1 means least and 10 means maximum level of
satisfaction with this question. First line of radio buttons represents the values of answer. For
example user selects the 7 answer so it means that user is quite satisfied. But why second line
of radio buttons? Second line is asking to the user about his answer that how much important
this answer for him. If he thinks this question is very important for him and he would like that
management should take action against his answer then he should choose around 10 because
10 means maximum worth and 1 means least worth of this answer.
After give the answers of all the questions when user submits the results. The controller will
receive the results and run the weighted average formula which you can see below under
Weighted Average heading.
43
Weighted Average
Step 1
Multiply answer and weight value and then add.
$answer_multiply_weight_sum += $answer_value*$weightvalue;
Step 2:
Add all weighted values of all answers.
$weight_sum += $weightvalue;
Step 3:
Divide answer from step 1 with answer of step 2.
$weighted_average = $answer_multiply_weight_sum / $weight_sum;
Why I used this formula because I wanted overall satisfaction level of the users. So this
formula has properties that it can calculate the average results of the user answers. So we can
compare average results with without average results. This represents to the management that
how many users are satisfied with the company. I will show this with line graph in next
section. At the backend the controller will send the results to the model which will save these
results into the database.
If this form was schedule as a type of monthly then cron job will send this survey every
month to the users and they will give the response. Why again because there is a possibility
that last month user was not satisfied with working environment of the company and he gave
answer and tell the company that he do not like this type of environment. When all users sent
the response then company realized that most of the users are not satisfy with company
environment so they need some modifications. The company did some modifications last
month and asked again same questions. If users liked those modifications then there should
be positive results otherwise this process will continue until the company will get the
reasonable feedback. When they will feel that it is quite acceptable results then they will
close this survey from the administration section.
6.1.4 Results of the Survey form
Now go back to the administration section and analyze the results of the survey form. I will
elaborate these results with an example. For example company sent one survey to the
employees in January 2011 as shown in figure 18. This survey was scheduled as a monthly
type. According to the schedule the system will send this survey every month by cron job. On
the other side the user got this form and sends the response back.
44
Time Period Answer Rate Overall Results Overall Results(Weighed)
Sent 2011-04-01 (April) 20/20 7.4/10 (74%) 9.3/10 (93%)
Sent 2011-03-01 (March) 20/20 6.5/10 (65%) 7.0/10 (70%)
Sent 2011-02-01 (February) 20/20 5.9/10 (59%) 6.3/10 (63%)
Sent 2011-01-01 (January) 20/20 5.4/10 (54%) 6.0/10 (60%)
Figure 18: Results of the Survey Form
You can see in figure 18 that first column represents the Time period of sending this form.
Second column show that how many users were and how many responded. The third column
represents that what was the average result of each user answer. The fourth and important
column represents that what was there weighted average results. The System will show these
results to the management in the form of line graph as shown in figure 19. This graph shows
that as time is progressing and company is taking positive steps for making good environment
for the employees. The satisfaction levels of the users are increasing.
Figure 19: Survey Form results
Because now users are familiar with each other and with the company environment so
everybody use to work here. It means that the company learn that by taking some little but
positive steps they can make their employees happy within four months. This will affect the
efficiency of the employees. It also increases the chances that the team will complete the
project successfully before deadline.
0.00%
10.00%
20.00%
30.00%
40.00%
50.00%
60.00%
70.00%
80.00%
90.00%
100.00%
January February March April
Weighted Average
Results (Satisfaction
Level )
45
6.2 Statistics
The statistics module implemented the four types of reports which were called financial
report, HR report, Project Overview and Company Overview. Figure 20 represents the
architecture of this module which represents that Report is an abstract class and other four
classes are concrete classes. The abstract class has definition of all common methods. It also
has implementation of some common methods which are implementing common
functionalities to the reports. The concrete classes are implementing all unique functionalities
and inherited the methods from abstract class.
Figure 20: Statistics Module Architecture
Report class has some common parameters that need every report like Full report, Remember
setting, Holidays in line charts and report duration time. The Full report means that when
user select this option. The system will generate the report of everything that belongs to this
report. The second parameter remembers setting. It is a dropdown box which represents that
user can save some sort of quick report setting. This will help to the user that he can generate
similar report by selecting the previous saved setting. The third option is holidays in line
charts which will show to the user that how many national holidays and weekends are coming
during the time of this report. The fourth and last parameter is duration. The duration
parameter allows to the user that he can generate specific report by selection of two dates.
When user will select the dates the system will generate the report within selected duration of
dates.
Report
Financial Report HR Report Project Overview Company Overview
46
6.2.1 Financial Report
The financial report deals with the finance section of the company where the company wants
to know about finance. The company has more concern about revenues, projected costs,
Costs, Salary, Vacations, Employee tax, and Overtime.
There are two types of revenues one is invoice and second is other types of revenues. Which
are representing that how much revenue generated in a company and from which sources?
Invoice revenue shows that all revenue got from clients and their products but other revenue
type shows all unknown sources from where company generates the revenue. The project
costs represent the costs of every project that the company has been completed during
selected period of dates. The salary parameter represents the salary of all the consultants who
worked on the project. So it shows to the company that what was the salary amount and what
was the price of the project. With this type of report the company can easily calculate profit
and loss of the project. Then next step was that the company wants to know how much
employee tax has been paid by the company so I introduced employee tax parameter which
will calculate the employee tax according to his salary amount. The final and next step was
that the company also wants to know about the overtime of every consultant. If somebody is
sitting in office after evening then company should know about him and the company will
pay him against his extra hours work.
User can achieve this entire functionality from statistics interface which I showed in figure
21. This designed implemented with the help of CSS, jQuery and jQuery Plug-ins. I modified
HTML components like checkbox into image and I customized dropdown box according to
my requirements as you can see in figure 21.
Figure 21: The financial report
47
6.2.2 Human Resource (HR) Report
The HR report belongs to Human Resource department which has responsibility to take care
of all employees and providing new employees to the company. This report is very crucial
and generated from the results of four modules of the company. As you can see in the figure
22 that it have first two inputs from form, thumbs modules and overtime of the employee
that comes from financial section of report. The fourth parameter will be used as cumulative
all these results.
Figure 22: Human resource report
6.2.3 Project Overview
The project overview reports section represent to the user that how many projects are going
on within a company. This report has responsibility that it will show to the user the complete
overview of all projects. It has five types of parameters. First one is active which show that
currently how many projects are active. Second parameter is margin hours which mean that it
will show the estimated remaining time of the projects. The third parameter is demography
which represents the demography of the all projects estimated time lines. How many projects
are going to complete within estimated time line and how many are going to be delay. The
fourth parameter represents the summary of all these three results at one place.
Figure 23: The Project Overview
48
6.2.4 Company Overview
The company overview report represents the overall status of the company. This report
depends upon the results of the other reports like Human Resource and Project Report. The
HR points represents that how many cumulative points he got from HR report project points.
It means that how many projects have been completed successfully and how many have been
delayed from deadlines. This report needs results from all other report so the user needs to
generate all other report before generation of this report.
Figure 24: The Company Overview
49
7 Conclusion
The aim of this project was to re-design its architecture and enhance the functionality of the
previous system with two modules namely; one was the “Survey Form” system and the
second was “Statistics” module. I have successfully implemented the architecture which was
highly scalable and flexible for integrating new modules in the system.
I have successfully implemented the two new modules in the system which were the survey
form system and statistics module. The survey form had aim to create new surveys and send
to the users. The users will send the response and this response will show to the graphs. The
statistics module had aim to generate a four different types of reports which were belongs to
the Financial, Human Resource, Project Overview and Company Overview reports.
8 Summary of Contribution
When I was analyzing and designing architecture for this BI system I learned many advance
techniques. List of all learned techniques I have mentioned below.
1. Getting requirements from the customer about his problem.
2. Why we need the BI systems in this world and what its role in the company.
3. How to develop the BI systems.
4. Analyzing the complex problems and find a solution.
5. Designing the architecture for projects at professional level.
6. Find a best and economically cheap solution for the customer.
7. Implementation of the complex problems.
8. How I can work in a team.
9. How to work with the version control software.
10. Follow coding standards and writing clean and simple code.
11. How to work with MVC architecture web frameworks.
12. How to work with SQL language.
13. What is HTML, CSS, jQuery and what its role in front end of website.
14. How important to meet deadlines at professional level projects.
9 Future Suggestions
The current system has lack of Alert Systems and it needs also improvement in statistics module so I
will suggest many things for future.
1. It needs fully functional Alert System.
2. Nice Graph Layout API that will present data into graph in a nice way.
3. Survey Form needs proper test cases for testing. We can use PHPUnit library for test cases.
50
Bibliography
[1] http://www.businessdictionary.com Retrieve 6 December, 2010.
[2] Hand Peter Luhn (October 1958).
[3]Daniel J. Power. A Brief History of Decision Support Systems
URL http://dssresources.com/history/dsshistory.html: Retrieve 6 December 2010.
[4] Boris Evelson Topic Overview: Business Intelligence
URL http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/topic_overview_business_intelligence/q/id/39218/t/2:
November 21, 2008.
[5] Ralph Kimball. The Data warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit (2nd ed.), Page 63.
[6] http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/default.aspx
[7] http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/index.html
[8] www.mysql.com
[9] http://www.iis.net/overview
[10] http://www.apache.org/
[11] Web Server.
URL http://httpd.apache.org: Retrieve 13 December, 2010.
[12] NetBeans IDE. Application Development IDE,
URL http://netbeans.org/features/index.html: Retrieved 15 December, 2010.
[13] PhpMyAdmin. Administration of MySQL,
URL http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php: Retrieved 13 December, 2010.
[14] http://codeignitor.com/
[15] http://symfony.com/
[16] HTML5. W3C,
URL http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html: Retrieved 15 December, 2010.
[17] CSS. Cascading Style Sheet,
URL http://www.css3.info: Retrieved 15 December, 2010.
[18] JQuery. JQuery writes less, do more,
URL http://jquery.com: Retrieved 15 December, 2010.
[19] JQuery Licence.
URL http://jquery.org/license: Retrieved 15 December, 2010.
[20] ORM. Object Relation Mapping,
51
URL http://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/orm/1.2/docs/manual/introduction/en#what-is-an-
orm? Retrieved 13 December, 2010.
[21] Doctrine. What is Doctrine?
URL http://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/orm/1.2/docs/manual/introduction/en#what-is-
doctrine? Retrieved 13 December, 2010.
doc_950276420.pdf
The goal of this project was to investigate the limitations of current Business Intelligence System (BI System) which was needed to re-design its architecture and embed two new modules. These two modules were named as Survey Form and Statistics Report.
IT 11 055
Examensarbete 30 hp
July 2011
Design and Implementation of
Business Intelligence Systems
Tanvir Ahmad
Institutionen för informationsteknologi
Department of Information Technology
Teknisk- naturvetenskaplig fakultet
UTH-enheten
Besöksadress:
Ångströmlaboratoriet
Lägerhyddsvägen 1
Hus 4, Plan 0
Postadress:
Box 536
751 21 Uppsala
Telefon:
018 – 471 30 03
Telefax:
018 – 471 30 00
Hemsida:
http://www.teknat.uu.se/student
Abstract
Design and Implementation of Business Intelligence
Systems
Tanvir Ahmad
The goal of this project was to investigate the limitations of current Business
Intelligence System (BI System) which was needed to re-design its architecture and
embed two new modules. These two modules were named as Survey Form and
Statistics Report.
The survey form has a very dynamic behavior, for example the administrator can
generate different types of surveys instantly by drag drop quick functionality of the
interface and he can also send that surveys to the users. The user will give the
answers of survey questions and send them back to the management of the company
where survey form modules helped them to analyze the answers in the form of
graphs. This survey form is also providing five different types of scheduling system
where administrator can schedule their surveys in five different ways like Once,
weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly.
Statistics module has different behaviors. It implemented four different types of
reports which are inter-related with each other. These four reports were named as
financial report, human resource report, project overview and company overview.
The finance report was responsible that it will show the revenue amount and source,
from where the company generated this revenue. The second report was belonged
to human resource department which was responsible for generating the overall
situation of the employees and their projects. For example how many are on holidays,
idle, working and going to be free soon. The third report was representing the
projects overview of all the projects. This report is responsible for checking the
status of all projects and show them in bar char who will show the management that
how many projects are completed, going to start or delay and going to finish soon.
The fourth and final report was responsible for generating report for the overall
company status.
This project has been completed successfully. The design, architecture and,
implementation of intelligent Survey Form and Statics modules have been
implemented and working successfully.
Tryckt av: Reprocentralen ITC
IT 11 055
Examinator: Anders Jansson
Ämnesgranskare: Justin Pearson
Handledare: Charlie Hansson
1
2
Acknowledgment
I would like to say thanks to those who helped me in this thesis. My supervisor Charlie
Hansson encouraged me throughout this thesis. He helped me a lot to understand this project
and enabled me to complete this project within the time limit.
Secondly, I am indebted to my colleagues Mattias Fliesberg, and Erik Nahkala who has
helped me a lot in solving technical issues. This thesis would not have been possible without
their help.
Finally, I would like to show my gratitude to everyone who has helped me to complete this
project.
Tanvir Ahmad
3
4
Contents
Contents
1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 8
1.1 Problem Description................................................................................................................. 8
1.2 Aim.......................................................................................................................................... 9
1.2.1 Survey Form Module ........................................................................................................ 9
1.2.2 Statistics Module .............................................................................................................. 9
1.3 Demarcations ......................................................................................................................... 10
2. Research Approach ........................................................................................................................ 11
3. Working Tools and Technologies ................................................................................................... 12
3.1 Development Environment ..................................................................................................... 12
3.1.1 Programming Language .................................................................................................. 12
3.1.2 Database ......................................................................................................................... 13
3.1.3 Web Server .................................................................................................................... 16
3.1.4 Netbeans IDE 6.9 (Development IDE) ............................................................................ 18
3.1.5 PhpMyAdmin (MySQL database management tool) ....................................................... 18
3.1.6 Web Framework ............................................................................................................. 19
3.1.7 HTML5 (Extensible Hypertext Markup Lanauge) ........................................................... 21
3.1.8 CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet) ........................................................................................ 21
3.1.9 jQuery ............................................................................................................................ 21
3.1.10 ORM (Object Relation Mapping) .................................................................................... 21
4. Project Background ....................................................................................................................... 23
4.1 Thumb Expression.............................................................................................................. 24
4.2 Chat ................................................................................................................................... 24
4.3 Consultants ........................................................................................................................ 25
4.4 Clients and Projects ............................................................................................................ 25
4.5 Finance .............................................................................................................................. 25
4.6 Time Reports...................................................................................................................... 25
4.7 Print Reports ...................................................................................................................... 25
4.8 Statistics ............................................................................................................................. 26
4.9 Overview ........................................................................................................................... 26
5
5. Design ........................................................................................................................................... 27
5.1 New architecture .................................................................................................................... 27
5.2 New BI System ...................................................................................................................... 28
5.3 Module Architecture .............................................................................................................. 30
6 Implementation .............................................................................................................................. 32
6.1 Survey Form ................................................................................................................................ 33
6.1.1 Administration Section of the Survey Form ........................................................................... 33
6.1.2 Scheduler ....................................................................................................................... 40
6.1.3 User Survey Form .......................................................................................................... 41
6.1.4 Results of the Survey form ............................................................................................. 43
6.2 Statistics................................................................................................................................. 45
6.2.1 Financial Report ............................................................................................................. 46
6.2.2 Human Resource (HR) Report ........................................................................................ 47
6.2.3 Project Overview ............................................................................................................ 47
6.2.4 Company Overview ........................................................................................................ 48
7 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 49
8 Summary of Contribution .............................................................................................................. 49
9 Future Suggestions ........................................................................................................................ 49
6
List of Figures
Figure 1 Comparison between PHP, .Net and Java ................................................................................. 13
Figure 2: Comparison of Databases ....................................................................................................... 15
Figure 3: Comparison of Apache and IIS ............................................................................................... 17
Figure 4: Comparison of CodeIgnitor and Symfony ............................................................................... 20
Figure 5: Old architecture ...................................................................................................................... 23
Figure 6: New System Architecture ....................................................................................................... 27
Figure 7: New BI System detailed architecture ...................................................................................... 29
Figure 8: Module architecture ................................................................................................................ 31
Figure 9: General picture of new modules .............................................................................................. 32
Figure 10: Survey Form database schema .............................................................................................. 33
Figure 11: User Section of Survey Form ................................................................................................ 34
Figure 12: Group List ............................................................................................................................ 36
Figure 13: Template categories .............................................................................................................. 38
Figure 14: Survey Form layout .............................................................................................................. 39
Figure 15: Life cycle of the Survey Form ............................................................................................... 40
Figure 16: One year time period frequency ............................................................................................ 41
Figure 17: User Survey Form................................................................................................................. 42
Figure 18: Results of the Survey Form ................................................................................................... 44
Figure 19: Survey Form results .............................................................................................................. 44
Figure 20: Statistics Module Architecture .............................................................................................. 45
Figure 21: The financial report ............................................................................................................... 46
Figure 22: Human resource report ......................................................................................................... 47
Figure 23: The Project Overview ........................................................................................................... 47
Figure 24: The Company Overview ........................................................................................................ 48
7
8
1. Introduction
Business Intelligence Systems (BI) aims to gather in depth information from the company
data and to analyze that data using different types of computer techniques and plotting which
results in different types of graphs that facilitate the company in the future decisions [1]. The
Business intelligence term was introduced by Hand Peter Luhn (Research at international
business management, IBM) and he defined it as a ”.... ability to apprehend the
interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal”
[2]. The BI Systems were evolved from the decision support systems that were developed in
the 1960s and continued till late 1980s. According to the Howard Dresner the term Business
Intelligence was the “.concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using
face-based support system“[3]. The BI Systems produced results from large chunks of data
that are stored in data warehouses or data mart. On the other hand it is not necessary that
every system that gets data from data warehouse is a BI system. Forrester defines the BI
system as: “Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and
technologies that transforms the raw data into meaningful and useful information. It allows
business users to make informed business decisions with real-time data that can put a
company ahead of its competitors“[4]. The BI Systems offered different types of reports
which provide facility in better decision making. It gathers information from big database and
analyzed them and presents in different types of reports (e.g. tabular, charts, graphs etc.).
These reports provide different types of statistics such as past and present situation of the
company that could help the top management in the better decision making.
1.1 Problem Description
This project was conducted in an Information technology (IT) company (ABC) that provides
solutions to different companies in Sweden. The company was using the BI system and they
figured out that the current BI system has a lot of problems. First the present architecture of a
system did not have a support for integration of new modules because they were not
following any authentic pattern like Model View Controller (MVC) model or Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA). Second the HTML pages were used to process most of the data
on their local machines that slow down the local machine because the resources were already
occupied by the already running programs on that machine. These two problems raised
number of other issues that are as follows.
9
? Re-design the architecture of the system
? Minimize Ajax requests
? Remove DOM Objects and use proper HTML templates.
They really need to redesign the architecture of the current BI system because it does not
have well structured architecture where they can integrate new modules in the future. Second
they want to minimize the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) requests because the
HTML pages of system were populating through Ajax requests that slow down the machines
performance. Third all Ajax requests response was coming in JavaScript object notation
(JSON) objects array which have huge size of data. They were using JavaScript language to
manipulate the JSON objects array for creation of Document Object Model (DOM) objects in
their HTML pages and that heavy the operations on pages, all these actions were affecting the
performance of HTML pages and working machine as well.
1.2 Aim
The objective of my work was to re-design the architecture of old BI system so that it
provides the facility to integrate new modules and to handle the number of issues that they
had in the old BI system. Furthermore I was liable to build two new modules. Those two
modules were Survey Form and Statistics reports.
1.2.1 Survey Form Module
The survey form module was required for consultants and clients of the company. Their
consultants often work at customer work place and they want to keep track of all the
information and to keep in touch with them. Through the survey form module the company
can ask different types of questions about their working environment and stress of the job etc.
and vice versa with the clients about consultants and progress of the projects. The survey
form module generates the survey forms that will assign to the specific groups of users and
each form was available for a specific period of time. The survey form will helps to get useful
information from the clients and consultants. Later that information facilitates the higher
authority to compare the previously received data with current data. It helps to analyze the
satisfaction level of the consultants and clients about the company or the project itself.
1.2.2 Statistics Module
Statistics module had aim to provide four different types of reports which were called
financial, human resource, project overview and company overview. Every report will
generate the important statistics of the company.
10
They did not have any specific way to calculate the company revenue, cost, and salaries of
the employees within a specific period of time that is why they wanted such as system from
where they can generate full report about the company financial situation.
Second report was belongs to human resource department of the company which was
responsible to generate a report that show them that how many consultants worked at how
many projects, which consultant was difficult to sell in market and which one was the best
resource for the company.
Third report was belongs to projects of the company. The management of the company
wanted to know that how many projects they had done within a specific period of time and
how many they completed within a dead line and after the deadline. This report was
responsible to show them that how many projects they have completed before dead line and
which project was delayed and which one is going to complete soon. All these results will be
representing in the form of pie chart.
Fourth and final report was belongs to company overview. It means that they wanted to see
full overview of the company. How the company business is going? Is it growing fast? Or is
there any chance to get loss in some projects. Above three reports already generate a financial
condition of the company, projects of the company and human resource of the company. By
using these three reports I can easily generate a report from where they can see the complete
and present situation of the company.
1.3 Demarcations
Typically the BI systems are too complex and have a big domain. So it was difficult to
research on all the domains of the BI system. Due to limited resources available at the
company that restricted me to only design and implement the survey form module, Statistics
module and try to improve the efficiency of the old BI system by re-structuring the previous
architecture of the system.
11
2. Research Approach
Research is defined as “…. a systematic process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting
information in order to increase our understanding of the phenomenon we are interested in or
concerned of” (Leedy and Ormrod, 2005). Research could be performed in two ways. One
way is to enhance the knowledge within the existing knowledge and the other is to generate a
new knowledge (Gliner and Morgan, 2000 pp. 5). This thesis follows the first way that is to
enhance and improve the functionality within the existing BI systems. In order to enhance
and improve the knowledge I followed Ralph Kimball (2008) method which proposed two
different way of gathering requirements for the BI systems. He described that “business users
and their requirements impact nearly every decision made throughout the design and
implementation of a DW/BI system. The business requirements sit at the center of the
business core and are related to all aspects of the daily business processes” [5]. There are two
ways of gathering information are conducting different types of interviews and facilitated
sessions. I had chosen the first way that is to conduct different types of interviews for that I
had conducted both formal and informal interviews with five different set of users. Both
formal and informal ways were used in order to avoid biases that each method inherent
(Interaction Design- Beyond human computer interaction, 2007, p.290). Formal interview
contains set of questions that were asked to Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief
Financial Officer, Sales Manager and Education Manager. Informal interview was also
conducted with those users in which different dialogues, chat, meetings, phones and emails
were held. In both formal and informal, the design of new system was shown to those users in
order to collect their feedbacks.
12
3. Working Tools and Technologies
The BI systems are unique because every BI system is based on the specific business logic
and it creates specific intelligent reports for the company. Therefore I selected some most
popular and widely used software from all over the world which helped me to develop this
system. I have discussed every software and tool with respect to its needs and functionality in
the following:
3.1 Development Environment
I was providing web based solution for the BI System. Therefore in order to choose the best
development environment was not an easy task because there were a lot of options available
for web. Since my focus was providing cheap, efficient and scalable solution for this project.
Therefore I selected the best tool and software after the comparisons of their competitors. In
the following section I have different comparisons of the web technologies with nearest
competitors where you can see that how I choose my tools for this project and why?
3.1.1 Programming Language
There were many programming languages available for web but three of them were very
popular in software industry. PHP, .Net and Java were the most important languages for web
and each of them has own properties, advantages and disadvantages according to the specific
requirements of the projects. I searched on the Internet “Which language is better for web?” I
found hundreds of articles who gave answer about this question but most of the articles were
biased because most of the authors were trying to promote their own language over the
others. So I am sure all of these languages we can use for big projects but when and where we
can use these languages? It is a big question mark today.
PHP and Java are open source languages but .Net is developed by Microsoft. .Net has huge
cost for running big projects and small projects. Therefore I had a discussion with the
company before starting of this project that how much budget they have for this project. They
said to me that they do not want to spend money for purchasing tools. They suggest me to
choose tools from open source directory which helped us to minimize the cost of this project.
This option did not allow me to choose .Net. Now I have two options PHP and Java.
Both PHP and java were powerful languages for websites but I had found one problem on
Internet when I was searching “which language is better?” Java seemed like a web language
for corporate sector and PHP used by peoples who were running their own websites.
13
Let me discuss which language provided me cheap solution because I was looking for cheap
solution. I checked that hosting server of Java websites was very expensive and these were
belongs to private industries. Other problem with Java was that its project configuration
required more time, development process was slow because it takes a lot time during
compiling and bug fixing. When I looked at PHP and compare with Java it had a lot of
advantages for me. For example its hosting servers were very cheap and it was very popular
for medium scale projects. Development process was very fast because very rich IDE
available for PHP there developers can manage enterprise level of projects very easily.
Finally I choose a PHP as web language for my project.
Comparison of PHP, .NET and Java
Area PHP .NET Java
License Free Not Free Free
Support Free Free Free
Platforms Multiple Windows Only Multiple
Hosting Cheap Expensive Expensive
Security Very Good Bad Good
Performance Very Good Require expensive hardware Require substantial
configuration and expensive
hardware
Scalability Very Well Can be difficult to scale Good
Frameworks Many good frameworks
available
Only one standard Framework Only one standard Framework
Configuration Extremely easy Not very flexible Flexible
Compatibility Backward Compatibility Often break functionalities So many problem between old
and new versions
Figure 1 Comparison between PHP, .Net and Java
3.1.2 Database
Database is a type of software where we can store information in an organized form. There
are two types of popular database are available one is called relational database and other is
called NoSQL database. We can use relational database where we know that our objects have
fixed number of properties and we can define their schema very easily in our database. But
where we will not be sure about our objects properties then there we shall use a schema free
database.
In my case I found that I had fixed number of properties of my objects and I can easily define
their schema in relational database. After realizing this I decided that I will use relational
database instead of schema free database.
After a little effort I found that there are many popular databases that I can use in my project.
MS SQL Database, Oracle Database and MySQL were the most famous ones but I had to
14
choose one of them to full fill my project requirements. Let me start to dig into one by one
and find out that what type of functionalities they had, how easy to use them, How much help
was available from community and which one was the most fits with my requirements?
MS SQL
MS SQL was a relational database produced and marked by Microsoft. We can interact with
database by two query languages T-SQL and ANSI SQL. Microsoft developed this by using
three famous computer languages C, C++ and C#. MS SQL only supports Windows platform
therefore users were bound to use Windows Server platform. Although it provided all
functionalities that we required from a relational database. For example it had strong support
of query language, procedures, triggers and views. It also had a strong community help from
many online forums. Microsoft also providing huge and well documented help in the form of
MSDN library there every developer can find every type of help very easily. Next thing to
find out that does it belongs to open source community? Do I need to buy a license? If I shall
buy a license then how much money I need to pay? I figured out that Microsoft had its
license ownership and if I want to use this database then I need to buy a license which was
very costly. The company does not want to spend money for buying software. Finally I skip
this option and start searching for Oracle database.
Oracle
Oracle database was a relational database produced and marked by Oracle Corporation.
Commonly Oracle database called as simply Oracle. Oracle database developed in two
famous languages C and C++ which supports on all types of platforms like UNIX, Linux,
Windows and MAC. That is why it can also run on all these platforms which were much
better choice than MS SQL. SQL was the main language for communication with Oracle
which supports all types of CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations. It also has
support for writing procedures, triggers and views. Oracle was a big database and it was very
popular among corporate sector where they had very highly and secured application. For
example in banks, ATM machines, telecommunications companies, Airline control database
etc. but it was also use in enterprise level applications where companies were running payroll
systems, attendance system of employees.
Oracle was also providing support for their customers but their customer needs to buy a
premium package for getting different types of support. They were providing online
documentation for everyone. Finally let me check out that do I need to buy a license if I want
to use in my project. I found that Oracle had huge cost for licensing of this database. I was
15
really interested to use this database but due to costs and limited amount of help I also skip
this database from my list and start searching for MySQL.
MySQL
MySQL was a relational database developed by Swedish company MySQL AB but later on it
owned by Oracle Corporation. MySQL developed in two famous languages C and C++
which supports on all types of platforms like UNIX, Linux, Windows and MAC. MySQL had
also support on all these platforms where these languages have. That is why I can say that it
gives me more independence of choosing database for my project. Like the other relational
databases MySQL was also using SQL language for CRUD operations on database tables and
it had also support for writing procedures, triggers, functions and views. MySQL belongs to
open source community and most of the open source software that requires full featured
database management system was also using MySQL.
MySQL was very popular choice of database for web applications and 70% of web
applications were using this database. Web applications which were using MySQL database:
Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and phpBB. Due to huge social
network of MySQL community it had a lot support from users in the form of discussion
forums, articles, books, tutorials and web seminars. MySQL was also providing online well-
structured documentation which was very helpful and easy to understand. The main
advantage for everyone was that it had not license cost and providing freedom to use it under
General Public License. This was the only open source database which was competing with
all other competitors like MS SQL and Oracle.
Comparisons of Databases
Feature MySQL MS SQL Oracle database
Platforms UNIX, Linux, Windows,
MAC
Windows UNIX, Linux, Windows,
MAC
License Free Not free Not free
Installation Very easy Hard Medium
Drivers Yes Yes Yes
Graphical
Interface
Yes - not good Yes – very good Yes - good
Triggers Yes Yes Yes
Procedures Yes Yes Yes
Scalability Yes Yes – not easy Yes
Public help Yes – very good Yes – very good Yes – not good
SQL Yes Yes Yes
Figure 2: Comparison of Databases
16
After analyzing of these three databases I found that MySQL was the only database that fits
with my project requirements. All databases were very good but the problem was that they
were costly and not popular for web application. MySQL provided me open source freedom
and all time support as well. MySQL is free with all these features that become factor of
minimizing the cost of the ownership. That is why most of the websites are migrating towards
this database. It also comes with LAMP package so it is highly configure in this distribution
and this is one of the best database that mostly use with PHP and Apache.
3.1.3 Web Server
Web server is software that provides help to get access of contents through Internet. Most of
the web servers are use by hosting companies for managing web applications. The web server
can deliver HTML pages and other documents like style sheets, JavaScript, images,
documents etc. to the client browser. Mostly Web browsers are acting as a client and sending
request in the form HTTP request and receive a response as an HTML page. In this world
there are many web servers available but I will discuss only two because these two are very
popular among web industry. These two web servers are Internet Information Service (IIS)
and Apache.
Internet Information Service (IIS)
IIS was a web server which was developed by Microsoft. It worked only on Windows
platform that is why it integrates IIS, ASP.NET, Windows communication Foundation, and
Window SharePoint Service together. IIS was the second most popular web server after
Apache. 20% of websites were running on IIS server. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS,
SMTP, and NNTP types of requests. So it was very good for web application. I got one
problem that it supports only ASP.Net technology but I was using PHP which did not have
support with IIS. Finally I skipped this option and moved forward to the Apache.
Apache
Apache server was a computer program that hosts different programs, directories, and files.
Apache makes these files accessible to the Internet, intranet and local host users by HTTP
requests. Apache renders the entire HTML and PHP files and sends them to the user browser.
The Apache server was different from its competitors for example Microsoft IIS (Internet
Information Server). Why was it different? Because it was free, open source and its code
available for view and modify. The Apache was also coming with different packages for
different platforms like WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) for windows, LAMP
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) for Linux and MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) for
17
Mac OS but the most popular package was LAMP and still it was getting more and more
popularity.
Apache was a web server and almost 60% of web sites were using it. It was widely used all
over the world because of open source and many other interesting features like it had many
implemented and compiled modules which extend the functionality of its core from server
side programming languages to authentication modules. It supports many languages but most
commonly used in PHP, Python, Perl and TCL. The most popular authentication mod was
mod_ssl [7].
Comparison of Apache and IIS
Figure 3: Comparison of Apache and IIS
As you can see in figure 5 that Apache and IIS has competition but for the Apache is a win-
win situation. As graph shows that in 2007 Apache popularity get down and Microsoft IIS get
some popularity but again from 2010 Apache is getting more and more popular. A reason is
that Apache is open source and it supports on every types of platforms like UNIX, Linux,
Windows and MAC. That is why hosting companies do not need to buy a license and they are
providing cheap hosting services to the customers.
Selection of Web Server
After analyzing the both web servers I found that Apache was the best web server for my
project because it had all functionalities that I needed in my project. For example, it was open
18
source, very well integration with PHP and MySQL, installation was very easy on all
platforms. Apache was available as part of LAMP distribution for Linux. This distribution
makes very easy for setting up new web server by using Linux environment which was also
open source and free.
Now I have all mandatory components for my project environment where I can start my
project development. I setup my web server on Ubuntu which was Linux based operating
system. I installed Apache2, MySQL 5.0, and PHP 3.3.2 which provided me full featured
web server where I can host my web application and make my all files public.
Next step was to start development but before this I need some more tools which will provide
me help during my development period. For example: Netbeans, Mercurial, PhpMyAdmin,
ORM (Object Relation Mapping), Ant and LiqueBase. All these tools I selected for project
management without any reason.
In the following headings I have short description of all these tools.
3.1.4 Netbeans IDE 6.9 (Development IDE)
Netbeans had lot of features that is why I used it in my project. (For example, it had built in
support for the PHP advance features, Ant, Mercurial, and other features). It was an open
source; free under Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and GPL
version 2 licenses [22]. It provided help to manage my project folders and files very easily.
The PHP plug-in provided an editor for writing well-structured code and highlight the
specific block of code. It had also support for intelligently detecting already defined
variables, classes and its methods. That is why it was one of the best IDE in the software
development industry.
3.1.5 PhpMyAdmin (MySQL database management tool)
PhpMyAdmin was a free and open source software tool written in PHP, intended to handle
the administration of MySQL over the web. PhpMyAdmin supports a wide range of
operations with MySQL. The most frequently used operations are supported by the users
interface (managing databases, tables, fields, relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc.).
While you still have the ability to directly execute any SQL statement [10]. It provided the
graphics interface for MySQL database to perform different types of operation. It makes
developer life easy otherwise it was very difficult to run all types of commands from the
command prompt.
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3.1.6 Web Framework
There are many web frameworks available on Internet and each one has own ideology but the
common thing is that all are following the MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture.
Basically different frameworks are providing different design of architectures. Most of the
web frameworks that belong to PHP technology are open source and give more choice to the
developers that they can choose framework according to their project needs. I choose two
frameworks that can meet with my project requirements. These frameworks are CodeIgnitor
and Symfony. Let me discuss one by one and then I will choose one of them for my project.
CodeIgnitor
CodeIgnitor was an open source and powerful PHP framework that was specially design for
small web application. It was providing many advantages to the developers who wanted to
meet their deadlines and deliver their projects stable and secure to their clients. For example:
? It was providing exceptional speed.
? Very easy to integrate and start new project on pre build architecture.
? It did not force to developer for following specific coding standards.
? It supports template language but does not force to the programmer to use it.
? Very easy to follow the MVC standards.
? There is no extra configuration settings means almost zero configuration settings.
Symfony
Symfony was also open source and very popular framework regarding PHP technology. It
was designed by Sensio Labs Germany. Symfony specially designed for small and large
scale web applications. They had developed many libraries that developers need during
development of any type of project. Symfony structure allowed developers to work
effectively and efficiently on the most complex types of problems. If developers follow their
instructions carefully then they will guarantees the stability, maintainability and
upgradeability of the project. Symfony was also providing many advantages to the developers
who wanted to deliver their projects on time.
? Its performance very fast and optimization was very easy.
? Very flexible to integrate new application in project.
? Its design provides facility that we can easily expand our project functionality.
? Stable and sustainable.
? It provides fully featured template engine.
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? It provides advance way of MVC model.
? It was not easy to configure but they explain step by step in detail.
Comparison of CodeIgnitor and Symfony
Feature Symfony CodeIgnitor
PHP4 No Yes
PHP5 Yes Yes
MVC Yes Yes
Modules Yes Yes
ORM Yes Yes – but very basic
Authentication Yes No
Cache Yes No
Validator Yes Yes
Ajax Yes Yes
License MIT Apache/BSD
Figure 4: Comparison of CodeIgnitor and Symfony
Selection of web framework
After looked into CodeIgnitor I found that it was very good for small applications where we
had small number of users, reasonable traffic and we did not need many technologies to
integrate in one project. So I skip this because in my case application was an enterprise level
and I need to integrate many other technologies as well. If you look at my goal in chapter 1
you will realize that I need a design that helps to the company in order to scale this project in
the future. Other reason is that they want template engine that will generate and render
HTML pages for this project. Finally I decided that Symfony was providing me all such type
of facilities and I can easily use this in my project because it was easy to learn and integrate
into the project environment.
After selection of framework I was about to start development but still I need to decide some
more things for my HTML pages. Which version I will use for HTML, CSS? Which
JavaScript library will I use for calling action of my pages? Why I look on it because there
are many web browsers are available in the market and every browser has own standards of
rendering HTML, CSS tags that is why it is very important if you want to stable your web
pages in every browsers. After a little effort and reading articles on web I learned that most of
the famous browsers were following latest standards of HTML and CSS. Finally I decided
that I will use HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery for my HTML pages.
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3.1.7 HTML5 (Extensible Hypertext Markup Lanauge)
HTML is a basic language for web pages and it is written in the form of elements which are
called tags. Every tag has two types of brackets starting and ending (like <html>). These tags
usually come with pairs (like <head>, </head>). First tag is called starting and second tag is
ending. I figure out that from many years there were no research on these tags but recently
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) did research on it and embedded new features in the
HTML language [21] that called major release of the HTML revision.
3.1.8 CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet)
CSS is primarily designed for separation of layout from the HTML document including font,
colors, table layouts and text styles. I used CSS for presenting look and formation of my web
pages written in a markup language. It is widely used language for styling HTML pages. It
helped me a lot to separate my HTML document presentation, which includes all elements
such as layout, colors, and fonts. This improves my content accessibility. It also becomes
more flexible and controllable on other pages. It enables me to access my formatting styles on
different pages and avoid duplication of my styles.
3.1.9 jQuery
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript library that simplifies the HTML documents
traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development [18].
It is open source and had dual license under MIT and GNU General Public License version 2
[19]. It is very rich application because it is very simple and very powerful in that sense that
we can get required results after writing a few lines of code. For example, I can put drag and
drop functionality on my web pages with it. I found that this library is really useful for
interface programming of web pages. Secondly, it provides me a plug-in that can customize
my HTML components into attractive one like image works, check box, modification of
dropdown interface etc.
3.1.10 ORM (Object Relation Mapping)
Object Relational Mapping (ORM) is a technique used in programming languages when
dealing with databases for translating incompatible data types in relational databases. This
essentially allows us to have a “virtual object database” that can be used from the
programming language [11].
I used PHP Doctrine in my project which was a collection of selected PHP libraries that
focused on the persistence functionalities. “Doctrine was an Object Relational Mapper
(ORM) for PHP 5.2.3+ that sits on top of the powerful Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL).
22
One of its key features was the option to write database queries in a proprietary object
oriented SQL dialect called Doctrine Query Language (DQL), inspired by Hibernates HQL.
This provided a powerful alternative to developers for SQL maintaining without requiring
unnecessary code duplication” [12].
23
4. Project Background
The BI System was developed by the company in 2006. Till now they had released two
versions of the system but now they are planning to add new functionalities to improve the
efficiency of the system.
The BI System offers many services to the consultants of the company. These consultants are
highly qualified professionals and among of these consultants each of them has different
types of expertise in different areas of the computer science. As the time is progressing and
everyone is getting more and more experience in his profession. The company wants to
manage information of all the consultants in a better way. They were using a system to
manage all these information but its architecture was as follows in figure 5:
Figure 5: Old architecture
BI
System
Thumbs
Chat
Consultants
Client and
Projects
Finance
Time
Reports
Statistics
Overview
Documents
24
The old BI System was providing seven different types of services which were as follows
? Thumb Expression
? Chat
? Consultants
? Clients and Projects
? Finance
? Time Reports
? Statistics
? Overview
? Documents
4.1 Thumb Expression
Thumbs was very interesting feature in the old BI System because whenever any consultant
was logged-in, the system instantly prompts the user with six different shapes of thumbs and
asked “how do you feel today?” the user then selects a thumb sign according to his current
mood and situation of the project. The most important thing was that it was taking only one
or two seconds and the user got into his account.
Figure 6: Thumb Expression
The company obtained a lot of help from this feature. (e.g. they can analyze the consultants
health, work load and they can identify the consultants who were not feeling good or maybe
they were in work pressure. So the company can easily identify their problems and fix them
as soon as possible.
4.2 Chat
In this module all consultants can communicate with each other via text messages. The
consultants could only post text messages on the discussion board because it was common for
everyone and there were no separate chat system. Due to this problem they were using Skype
for internal communication.
25
4.3 Consultants
There were two types of consultants list: one was “Active” and the other was “Passive”. The
active consultants were those who were currently working and the passive were those who
were not working currently and the company was trying to sell them in the market. The
company can easily add new consultants, view, update, and delete already saved consultant
information.
4.4 Clients and Projects
There were two types of clients list one was “Active” and the other was “Passive”. The active
clients were those whose projects were currently going on and the passive clients were those
whose projects had been completed or will start in near future. This module shows client
profiles, their projects and status of each project. It was also showing the complete progress
of the projects. The user can also create new client, view already saved client profiles and
projects.
4.5 Finance
Finance services were assisting the company in the calculation of the consultant salaries
according to per hour rate. It was representing the different properties such as start date, end
date, salary/hour, salary/month, tax rate, average, vacation and part time. It also showed the
list of all consultants and presented their property values in each column.
4.6 Time Reports
This module was helping the project managers to assign total working hours of the newly
created projects to the relative consultants. Each consultant can update their working hours
every day in the calendar. The time report helped them to elaborate how many hours had
been reported by each consultant regarding their project work and how many hours were
remaining. This functionality assisted the consultants to easily report their working hours in
the text box and add it into the calendar by using “drag and drop” functionality.
4.7 Print Reports
This module was generating three types of PDF reports stated as Invoice Generation System,
Salary Specification, and Project Card. In invoice generation report they were creating the
reports against one client by selecting specific period of time. The salary specification type
was generating reports against the salary of every consultant within a specific period of time
and the project card type was generating reports for a specific project. The system itself saved
these reports in server directory because it also displayed the list of all reports so that next
time the user of the system can easily download the already generated reports from the server.
26
4.8 Statistics
This represented the different types of the graph presentation of current year and it also had
options for creating graphs according to the specific period of time. It contains weekly work
load graph where it can be easily analyzed. How work load was divided in each week? It also
contains the graph representation of the thumb expressions. Where the user can see that how
many consultants are logged in every day and what was their feelings, either they were tired
or fresh.
Figure 7: Statistics
4.9 Overview
This module represented the full view of the company in just one click and displayed all the
information of the projects. It was also a short representation of all the projects and their
consultants. (e.g. system can easily calculate status of every project that how many hours
were estimated and what was their starting and ending date. While clicking on any particular
day of the specific project the system pops up with detailed hours graph as shown in figure 8.
This figure presented the three bars: the first bar presents how many hours were estimated at
start. The Second bar presented how many hours have been worked out by the consultants
and the third bar showed that how many hours were remaining to finish this project.
Figure 8: Overview of Project Hour
27
5. Design
The second chapter described that what type of tools I used to build this system and third
chapter describe that what kind of old system was and how was its architecture. Now I will
explain the design of new system and how I used all my tools to build this new system.
5.1 New architecture
The architecture in the figure 9 shows the general structure of this system which contains two
new modules and core of the system. This core will provide the architecture where the
company can integrate new modules very easily in the future. Most of the modern
architectures are following this classical design for large projects. Since my focus was to
develop this system. I divided my solution into three main parts. First I designed core
structure of the system which was based on MVC architecture and other many things that I
will discuss later. Secondly I designed architecture for its new module which was also based
on the MVC architecture.
Figure 6: New System Architecture
The new BI system core is the heart of the system which will receive all requests from user
and forward them to the particular module of the system. For a moment assume that it
New BI
System
Survey
Form
Statistics
28
forwards all requests successfully to the related modules. How it will forward all requests?
That I will describe in next section. The next task was that I have to develop two modules and
integrate with my new system. Every module contained two parts one for administrator and
second for client. The module architecture is based on MVC model. It has one controller that
will handles all request from user and administrator and send them to the related model. The
model will communicate with the database and send the feed back to the controller back.
After getting feedback from model the controller forwards the request to the template engine
which renders the HTML pages and sends them to the browser.
5.2 New BI System
Figure 7 represents the general architecture of the BI system but it is not representing the
detail information about the module. How modules are integrated with this system I will
describe here but structure of modules I will describe in next section.
The web framework provided me great help in order to handle the HTTP request from web
browser. As you can see in figure 7 there are two important part of framework. One is Front
Controller and other is Symfony Kernel. Every HTTP request has two types of objects which
are called Request and Response Objects. These two objects are very simple itself but the
hard part of the application is that what will come in between these two requests. Symfony is
specifically designed for solving this type of problems. Otherwise it is very difficult to handle
the all types of HTTP requests like sending emails, handling form submissions, saving
objects into database, rendering HTML pages and protecting content from hackers. It is also
difficult to manage all types of these requests and keep my code organized and maintainable.
Traditionally if you look on the site building process of each web site then you will see that
there are many URLs defined manually like index.php and contact.php. These URLs create a
huge problem when somebody wants to change its name. Why it has problem? Because it has
definition in different places of website for the navigation purpose therefore it needs to
change its name everywhere that would be time consuming process. Other problem is that if I
will create different PHP libraries then I need to include my all libraries in every file to
maintain the consistency of the code. That would be a difficult and time consuming process
as well. To overcome this problem I introduced front controller in my architecture which
handles all types of request that comes from users. Introducing front controller is much better
solution because it is a single PHP file that will handle all types of request that coming to
your application. This approach solves all traditional problems like changing URL names,
29
defining libraries, configuration settings with database. All these definitions should be in one
file and everybody can change them very easily and in a very less time.
Front controller has only the definition of all types of requests. It has responsibility to
forward these request to the Symfony Kernel which handles these requests and call specific
module controller. We will discuss about module controller in the next section. As you can
see in figure 7 when Front controller gets a request it simply forward that request to the
Kernel. It process the URL filters and send the response back to the kernel. After getting
response back. The kernel call the specific module as shown in figure.
Figure 7: New BI System detailed architecture
/ /statistics /surveyform
Front Controller
Symfony Kernel
Request URL
Controller
Routing
DefaultModule
SurverFormModule
StatisticsModule
NewModule
30
5.3 Module Architecture
All modules of this project have the same MVC architecture as shown in figure 8. MVC is an
architectural pattern and this is used almost in all programming languages. The MVC
architecture helps me to separate my domain logics into different layers. It also helps me to
control the flow of my application request in a good manner. MVC has different types of
flavors but my application has control flow as follows
User makes an interaction with interface through browser and sends a request to the
controller. The controller will handle the request and convert into an appropriate form which
understandable for model layer. The model will take the action against this request and
response back to the controller or directly to the view layer. This view layer will generate a
HTML page against this response and forward to the browser.
In my modules when browser will send a request to the web server then web server will
forward this request to the Front controller of the system which I discussed in 4.2 sections.
Front Controller route this request to the related module of the system where special
controller of the module will handle this request and forward to the model layer. I do not have
simple model layer as mostly we have in the MVC architecture. I have integrated ORM layer
with my model layer which sits between model and database. This ORM layer received a
request from model and generates a query for database. After getting query from ORM the
database generate a result and response back to the model layer. The model has responsibility
to forward this result to the controller. The controller will forward this request to the View
part of this module. The view is also not simple as we have in common MVC architecture. As
the view will get a response from controller it will interact with HTML template engine. This
will generate a HTML page for view and send to the view layer. The view layer just receives
the HTML page and flushes to the web browser.
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Figure 8: Module architecture
Controller
Model
ORM
Database
View
Browser
Web Server
System core
Response
HTML, CSS,
JavaScript,
images
32
6 Implementation
In the previous section I described how I redesigned all structure of this project. Now in this
section I will discuss that how many modules I suppose to implement and how I implemented
these modules. There were two modules that I supposed to implement for this system. Figure
9 represents the general idea of these new modules. If you look at the Survey Forms at left
side of the BI system then you can see that it has five different types of forms. These types
are representing five different types of scheduling of this survey form which I will discuss in
coming sections. On the right hand side of the BI System you can see statistics module which
is representing four different types of reports. I will discuss in coming sections. What type of
these reports are and how I implemented them.
Figure 9: General picture of new modules
BI System
Forms Statistics
Once Weekly Monthly Quarterly
Financial Report HR Report Project Overview Company Overview
Yearly
33
After getting the requirements, when I was clear enough about my job I started
implementation. I designed a database schema according to my requirements which as
follows in figure 10.
Objects Properties
Category id, name, formid, categorytype (template, form)
CosForm id, name, startdate, enddate, closeable, formtype(once, weekly, monthly, quarterly,
yearly), activationdate, status
FormAverage id, formid, unweighted, weighted, answerdate
FormGroups id, formid, groupid
SurveyForm id, formid, categoryid, questionId, answer, answertype, answertext, weight,
answerdate
GlobalForm id, formid, groupid, userid, usertype(customer, consultant), globalid, viewable,
visitdate, answerdate
UserForm id, userid, formid, answerdate, formtype, stratdate, enddate, visits, visitdate,
activatedate
UserVisits id, userid, formid, visits, visitdate
Group id, name
GroupUser id, groupid, userid, usertype
Question id, question, categoryid, questiontype
Figure 10: Survey Form database schema
When I was ready with my schema I start to create my schema within MySQL database. By
default MySQL has command line interface. By this interface we can run SQL queries one by
one and create a database schema. But Running SQL queries through command line it was
difficult and time consuming. So I used one open source tool PhpMyadmin which provided
me complete interface. From this tool I can perform all types of operations on database very
easily and quickly. Using this tool I create all my tables into database and start
implementation of the survey form module.
6.1 Survey Form
The survey form has two types of interfaces. One for the administration and the other section
is for the users. From administration section the company can create surveys and send them
to the users. From the user section user can answer the survey questions and submit to the
management.
6.1.1 Administration Section of the Survey Form
The administration section provides the dynamic feature for this module. I divided survey
form layout into three columns as shown in figure 11. Left layout of the survey form shows
34
the list of all consultants and clients. Center layout represents the list of all groups of the
users. These groups will be assigned to the survey forms. Last and most right layout provides
the functionality where administrator can create new survey form.
Figure 11: User Section of Survey Form
Let me discuss one by one how I implemented all these functionalities.
Group Users
In the survey form module controller is the responsible of every request that comes from
browser. As controller will receive a request to load a HTML page for create the survey form.
It will call an index method of the controller that will populate list of users, groups of users,
survey forms and list of template categories at bottom section of the survey form.
As controller will receive a request it will call a database service related to particular entity
class and create a connection with database. Because it is using persistent database
connection so I do not need to worry about connection limitations. As it will establish a
connection with database, the controller will send a request to the model for getting list of the
users. The model class will pass the request to the ORM layer which is responsible for
fetching data from database. I used PhpDoctrine ORM layer which is providing me facility
that I can write my queries in the objects form instead of writing traditional SQL queries. The
advantage is that I do not need to handle most of the database security issues myself. The
most popular issue was database injection which is almost crash the application. After
fetching data from database the ORM layer. It sends back the response to the model class. As
model class will receive the data then it will forward the request to the controller where
controller receives the response data and forward to the particular view. View receives this
data and sends to the template engine which will generate a HTML page and forward to the
view class. The view class will display this HTML page to the browser.
Survey Form Layout
Left Layout Center Layout Right layout
35
Form Group
The center layout represents the list of groups. Each group has list of consultants and clients
so controller will call the index method which also follow the same request procedure as I
describe procedure for user list at left layout. Extra feature is that there is create and delete
operations exist for groups. When user will click on create button controller will receive a
request and call a create group method which will send the request to the template engine that
will create a HTM L form and send it to the browser where user will interact this form and
write a name of the group. After writing name of the group, user will submit the group form
and validate the form field with jQuery form validation plug-in. if form is valid then it will
allow the form to send data to the controller. The controller will receive the data and validate
the form field at server side as well for secure validation. If validation will failed then error
message send to the view which will display the message to the user browser. Otherwise
controller will call the database service and establish a persistent connection. After creating a
successful connection with database controller will send the HTML form data to the model.
The model will forward this data to the ORM layer which insert the group name into database
and send response back to the model. If response is true then group name added successfully
otherwise there should be an error message. Whatever the response is, the model will send
this response to the controller and controller will forward this message to the view which will
display the result to the user browser.
36
Figure 12: Group List
After creating a group, now it is time to add consultants and clients in the group from left
layout. I used jQuery multi select plug-in which provides me functionality that I can select
multiple names by mouse click from user list. At once I have selection of users from list, the
next step is just to drag that names and drop into the panel of group that I created before. As I
will drop the names $.ajax() method of jQuery will call and create a JavaScript array of all
user ids and types. As I discussed before there are two types of users, one is consultant and
other is client. After creating the arrays of consultants and clients $.ajax() method will send
the HTTP request to the Rest Controller. I introduced the rest controller for separate the Ajax
requests. The advantage is that it is easy to separate the types of HTTP requests which
provide the flexibility for maintaining the code structure of the controller. After getting the
request the rest controller will call the database service and establish a persistent connection.
When connection with database will be ready, the controller will grab the arrays information
and convert them into PHP arrays. These PHP array has the ids and types of users. The
controller will send these arrays to the model where model forward these arrays to the ORM
37
layer. Now ORM layer will run the SQL query on Group User table and insert the all user ids
and types against this group. After successful insertion into the database of the group users the
controller will receive a response from model and re-load the user page. You can see the HTML
layout in the group user list figure 12.
Template Categories
Template category section is specially designed for those set of questions that most ly use in
the survey forms. The advantage of this section is that the management of the company can
create a set of questions for future use because it is providing functionality to the
management that when they will create a new survey form then they can use these template
categories in the form.
In this section we can add, edit and delete categories. All these actions handle by the rest
controller of the survey form module. When user click on the add category button then it will
call the jQuery method show(). This method will show the HTML form for getting input from
user. As user will write a name of the template category and submit the category form. The
controller will validate the form and check the category name. Is it already exists or not? If it
is already exists then controller will send the message to the user browser that duplicate
category does not allow otherwise controller forward the category name to the model of the
module. The model will send the value to the ORM layer which is responsible for inserting
this value into the category table of database.
You can see in figure 13 that every template category has different type of questions. You
can also add, edit and delete the questions from category. Every question will take the answer
in the form of radio buttons or text area. I will discuss this functionality in the coming
section when I will discuss user interface of the survey form. But in the administration
section whenever we will define the answer we will specify the answer type as well. There is
a radio button against every question type if it is checked then answer type should be text
otherwise it would be choice of radio buttons where user needs to check one radio button
while giving the answer.
For update functionality I used an editable plug-in of jQuery. Why I used this plug-in because
it provides me functionality that I can easily update my category and question text. When
user will click on the category or question edit image button then jQuery calls this plug-in
which replace the text with HTML textbox. In this text box user can easily change text and
click on the update image again. As user will click on the update image, the editable plug-in
38
will call the jQuery method $.ajax() and at the same time it will replace the textbox with
updated text. But at the backend $.ajax() method will send the Ajax request to the rest
controller which will receive the updated text and forward to the model. The model will forward this
request to the ORM layer which will update the text into the database.
I have implemented an interactive layout for the template category section. As you can see in
figure 13 that there is a list of categories which I have designed using CSS. On this list I have
also implemented the jQuery SlideUp() and SlideDown() functionality. When user will click
on the heading of the category SlideDown() methed will open the category section and list
out the questions. The advantage of this functionality is that user can easily manage many
categories within small place of page.
Figure 13: Template categories
Survey Forms
Until now I have discussed three building blocks that I need for creating one survey. These
three building blocks are group users, form groups and template categories. In this section I
will describe the section of survey form layout which will use these three blocks. Here Figure
14 represents the original layout of the survey form administration section. Where user can
create new surveys and send them to the users. Let me explain how this section will work
from top to bottom.
Here we can schedule the survey forms with five different types of time periods. These time
periods are defined as Once, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly. The Once type of
scheduling represents the survey form which will assign to the users for one time. When all
users send the results then system will close the survey form. Other four types of scheduling
represents the survey forms which will be assign to the users at once. After assigning the
survey form, the user will get the survey at start date of the schedule. According to the
schedule type of the survey form the system will automatically calculate the schedule date for
next time. When next schedule date will come the system itself send the same survey form
39
with same set of questions to the same groups of users which have been assigned to the
survey forms before. This phenomenon will continue until the end date arrives. At arriving of
end date the system will close the survey form.
Figure 14: Survey Form layout
Implementation of Survey Forms
In this section I will describe in detail that how I implement the above functionality. When
user will click on the ADD FORM button at top right hand side of the form section, the
show() method of the jQuery will be invoke and show the HTML form. This form consists of
four input fields, Form name, start date, end date, and schedule type of the survey form. The
form name represents the title of the survey form. The start and end date fields represent the
active and closing date of the survey form. The fourth field defines the schedule type of the
survey form. The administrator can create a new survey form very easily by using this form.
He will just define the four fields and submit the form. The controller is responsible for
validation and saving the values into database. The controller of the module will receive the
post request and run the validation process on it. If validation process is passed then
controller will forward the request to the model. Otherwise an error message will be generate
and send back to the user. The model will receive the data and forward to the ORM layer
which will run the insert operation on the database and response to the controller. If response
is positive then it will refresh the page otherwise send the exception. Once the survey form
defines it will provide the HTML panel where administrator can add categories and its
questions. There I have provided two choices for them. First they can use the template
categories as survey form categories. They can get this template category by drag and drop
functionality. Second option is that they can also add categories and questions within a form
panel as well. But template categories are providing quick solution for them because
40
management of the company does not have too much time for creating survey forms therefore
they need to use this functionality. When template category will drop on the survey form
panel then jQuery method $.ajax() receive the template category id and send to the rest
controller which will copy the complete content of the template category and insert all these
contents as a new category. Because I want independent categories in the survey forms
therefore I copy it instead of saving its reference as foreign key. The advantage is that now
they can modify their questions and its categories names. Due to this facility they can use
these template categories in other survey forms as well.
Life cycle of the Survey form
Figure 15: Life cycle of the Survey Form
6.1.2 Scheduler
In order to control the scheduling periods of each survey form I need to implement one
scheduler. The scheduler is the main heart of the survey form. The scheduler divided the
survey form duration into different number of time periods according to the schedule type.
Figure 16 shows that if survey form has type weekly then scheduler will divide the duration
into 52 time periods, similarly monthly survey will be divide into 12 time periods, Quarterly
survey into 4 time periods and yearly survey one time in a year. This survey form duration is
Survey Form
Administrator
Survey Form
Client
Schedular
Results
Weekly
Monthly
Quarterly
Yearly
Send Survey
according to the
schedule
Check
Schedule
41
calculated from start and end date of the survey form which is specified when survey form
created.
Figure 16: One year time period frequency
I have implemented four cron jobs at apache server and tell to the apache that runs these jobs
at the start of every time period. For example the weekly cron job will run on every Sunday
night and send the weekly surveys to the users, similarly the monthly cron job will run on
every last date of the month, the quarterly cron job will run on every last date of the quarter
month of the year and yearly cron job will be run on every last date of the year.
6.1.3 User Survey Form
Before this section I have discussed all about the administration section of the survey form.
How administrator can design new surveys and send them to the users. I think it is a right
time to discuss about user survey form layout that how user will interact with this? How I
implemented? Let me discuss short description of page layout that how user will get this
survey? How user will give answers to the questions and submit them to the company
management.
Figure 17 represents the HTML view of the survey form which has title and list of questions
under different category names. As I discussed in template category section that when
administrator will define a question. He will also specify the types of question input. Is it a
text or choice for user? If you look at figure 17 then you can see that first question has text
type and other questions have choice options for user. All these questions are dynamically
defined at administration section therefore there is no limit of number of questions per
survey. Administrator can define questions as much as he wants. Of course there will be a
problem of listing when administrator will define a huge number of questions and it will also
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Weekly Monthly Quaterly Yearly
Time Periods
42
affect the efficiency of the page. So I discussed this issue with the company. They told me
that they do not have more than 10 questions in any survey. This answer makes me clear that
there will be no problem with number of questions.
Figure 17: User Survey Form
The question with text area allows only 200 characters to the user for giving answer. This
limitation of text bounds the user to write answer short and to the point. The question with
radio buttons has special feature. You can see in figure 17 that except first question all other
questions have two lines of radio buttons. What does it means? Let me explain this with
example. We have an example question “Do you like working environment?” after this
question user will have two lines of radio button and each line has 10 options which are
starting from 1 and ending at 10. Number 1 means least and 10 means maximum level of
satisfaction with this question. First line of radio buttons represents the values of answer. For
example user selects the 7 answer so it means that user is quite satisfied. But why second line
of radio buttons? Second line is asking to the user about his answer that how much important
this answer for him. If he thinks this question is very important for him and he would like that
management should take action against his answer then he should choose around 10 because
10 means maximum worth and 1 means least worth of this answer.
After give the answers of all the questions when user submits the results. The controller will
receive the results and run the weighted average formula which you can see below under
Weighted Average heading.
43
Weighted Average
Step 1
Multiply answer and weight value and then add.
$answer_multiply_weight_sum += $answer_value*$weightvalue;
Step 2:
Add all weighted values of all answers.
$weight_sum += $weightvalue;
Step 3:
Divide answer from step 1 with answer of step 2.
$weighted_average = $answer_multiply_weight_sum / $weight_sum;
Why I used this formula because I wanted overall satisfaction level of the users. So this
formula has properties that it can calculate the average results of the user answers. So we can
compare average results with without average results. This represents to the management that
how many users are satisfied with the company. I will show this with line graph in next
section. At the backend the controller will send the results to the model which will save these
results into the database.
If this form was schedule as a type of monthly then cron job will send this survey every
month to the users and they will give the response. Why again because there is a possibility
that last month user was not satisfied with working environment of the company and he gave
answer and tell the company that he do not like this type of environment. When all users sent
the response then company realized that most of the users are not satisfy with company
environment so they need some modifications. The company did some modifications last
month and asked again same questions. If users liked those modifications then there should
be positive results otherwise this process will continue until the company will get the
reasonable feedback. When they will feel that it is quite acceptable results then they will
close this survey from the administration section.
6.1.4 Results of the Survey form
Now go back to the administration section and analyze the results of the survey form. I will
elaborate these results with an example. For example company sent one survey to the
employees in January 2011 as shown in figure 18. This survey was scheduled as a monthly
type. According to the schedule the system will send this survey every month by cron job. On
the other side the user got this form and sends the response back.
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Time Period Answer Rate Overall Results Overall Results(Weighed)
Sent 2011-04-01 (April) 20/20 7.4/10 (74%) 9.3/10 (93%)
Sent 2011-03-01 (March) 20/20 6.5/10 (65%) 7.0/10 (70%)
Sent 2011-02-01 (February) 20/20 5.9/10 (59%) 6.3/10 (63%)
Sent 2011-01-01 (January) 20/20 5.4/10 (54%) 6.0/10 (60%)
Figure 18: Results of the Survey Form
You can see in figure 18 that first column represents the Time period of sending this form.
Second column show that how many users were and how many responded. The third column
represents that what was the average result of each user answer. The fourth and important
column represents that what was there weighted average results. The System will show these
results to the management in the form of line graph as shown in figure 19. This graph shows
that as time is progressing and company is taking positive steps for making good environment
for the employees. The satisfaction levels of the users are increasing.
Figure 19: Survey Form results
Because now users are familiar with each other and with the company environment so
everybody use to work here. It means that the company learn that by taking some little but
positive steps they can make their employees happy within four months. This will affect the
efficiency of the employees. It also increases the chances that the team will complete the
project successfully before deadline.
0.00%
10.00%
20.00%
30.00%
40.00%
50.00%
60.00%
70.00%
80.00%
90.00%
100.00%
January February March April
Weighted Average
Results (Satisfaction
Level )
45
6.2 Statistics
The statistics module implemented the four types of reports which were called financial
report, HR report, Project Overview and Company Overview. Figure 20 represents the
architecture of this module which represents that Report is an abstract class and other four
classes are concrete classes. The abstract class has definition of all common methods. It also
has implementation of some common methods which are implementing common
functionalities to the reports. The concrete classes are implementing all unique functionalities
and inherited the methods from abstract class.
Figure 20: Statistics Module Architecture
Report class has some common parameters that need every report like Full report, Remember
setting, Holidays in line charts and report duration time. The Full report means that when
user select this option. The system will generate the report of everything that belongs to this
report. The second parameter remembers setting. It is a dropdown box which represents that
user can save some sort of quick report setting. This will help to the user that he can generate
similar report by selecting the previous saved setting. The third option is holidays in line
charts which will show to the user that how many national holidays and weekends are coming
during the time of this report. The fourth and last parameter is duration. The duration
parameter allows to the user that he can generate specific report by selection of two dates.
When user will select the dates the system will generate the report within selected duration of
dates.
Report
Financial Report HR Report Project Overview Company Overview
46
6.2.1 Financial Report
The financial report deals with the finance section of the company where the company wants
to know about finance. The company has more concern about revenues, projected costs,
Costs, Salary, Vacations, Employee tax, and Overtime.
There are two types of revenues one is invoice and second is other types of revenues. Which
are representing that how much revenue generated in a company and from which sources?
Invoice revenue shows that all revenue got from clients and their products but other revenue
type shows all unknown sources from where company generates the revenue. The project
costs represent the costs of every project that the company has been completed during
selected period of dates. The salary parameter represents the salary of all the consultants who
worked on the project. So it shows to the company that what was the salary amount and what
was the price of the project. With this type of report the company can easily calculate profit
and loss of the project. Then next step was that the company wants to know how much
employee tax has been paid by the company so I introduced employee tax parameter which
will calculate the employee tax according to his salary amount. The final and next step was
that the company also wants to know about the overtime of every consultant. If somebody is
sitting in office after evening then company should know about him and the company will
pay him against his extra hours work.
User can achieve this entire functionality from statistics interface which I showed in figure
21. This designed implemented with the help of CSS, jQuery and jQuery Plug-ins. I modified
HTML components like checkbox into image and I customized dropdown box according to
my requirements as you can see in figure 21.
Figure 21: The financial report
47
6.2.2 Human Resource (HR) Report
The HR report belongs to Human Resource department which has responsibility to take care
of all employees and providing new employees to the company. This report is very crucial
and generated from the results of four modules of the company. As you can see in the figure
22 that it have first two inputs from form, thumbs modules and overtime of the employee
that comes from financial section of report. The fourth parameter will be used as cumulative
all these results.
Figure 22: Human resource report
6.2.3 Project Overview
The project overview reports section represent to the user that how many projects are going
on within a company. This report has responsibility that it will show to the user the complete
overview of all projects. It has five types of parameters. First one is active which show that
currently how many projects are active. Second parameter is margin hours which mean that it
will show the estimated remaining time of the projects. The third parameter is demography
which represents the demography of the all projects estimated time lines. How many projects
are going to complete within estimated time line and how many are going to be delay. The
fourth parameter represents the summary of all these three results at one place.
Figure 23: The Project Overview
48
6.2.4 Company Overview
The company overview report represents the overall status of the company. This report
depends upon the results of the other reports like Human Resource and Project Report. The
HR points represents that how many cumulative points he got from HR report project points.
It means that how many projects have been completed successfully and how many have been
delayed from deadlines. This report needs results from all other report so the user needs to
generate all other report before generation of this report.
Figure 24: The Company Overview
49
7 Conclusion
The aim of this project was to re-design its architecture and enhance the functionality of the
previous system with two modules namely; one was the “Survey Form” system and the
second was “Statistics” module. I have successfully implemented the architecture which was
highly scalable and flexible for integrating new modules in the system.
I have successfully implemented the two new modules in the system which were the survey
form system and statistics module. The survey form had aim to create new surveys and send
to the users. The users will send the response and this response will show to the graphs. The
statistics module had aim to generate a four different types of reports which were belongs to
the Financial, Human Resource, Project Overview and Company Overview reports.
8 Summary of Contribution
When I was analyzing and designing architecture for this BI system I learned many advance
techniques. List of all learned techniques I have mentioned below.
1. Getting requirements from the customer about his problem.
2. Why we need the BI systems in this world and what its role in the company.
3. How to develop the BI systems.
4. Analyzing the complex problems and find a solution.
5. Designing the architecture for projects at professional level.
6. Find a best and economically cheap solution for the customer.
7. Implementation of the complex problems.
8. How I can work in a team.
9. How to work with the version control software.
10. Follow coding standards and writing clean and simple code.
11. How to work with MVC architecture web frameworks.
12. How to work with SQL language.
13. What is HTML, CSS, jQuery and what its role in front end of website.
14. How important to meet deadlines at professional level projects.
9 Future Suggestions
The current system has lack of Alert Systems and it needs also improvement in statistics module so I
will suggest many things for future.
1. It needs fully functional Alert System.
2. Nice Graph Layout API that will present data into graph in a nice way.
3. Survey Form needs proper test cases for testing. We can use PHPUnit library for test cases.
50
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