Program 4: More Employees Due Thursday 4/20/16

Program 4 More Employeesdue Thursday 472016modify The Program You

Modify the program created for P3 Employee Data to process a file containing employee information and generate a printable report. Use dialog boxes for flexible file retrieval and saving. Replace parallel arrays with an array of structures, each representing an employee with fields: Employee ID, Name, Phone Number, Department, Year Started, Salary, and Years of Service. The array should hold up to 100 employee records.

The program must support the following functions: adding employee data with validation, displaying a list of employees, reviewing and computing years of service, finding the employee with the highest years of service, calculating the average years of service, and looking up employees by ID. Certain features like finding highest years of service and average calculation should only be accessible after adding employees.

Additional features include printing the employee list with print preview, using dialog boxes for file operations (open, save, append), and designing a modular program with procedures and functions for validation, lookup, calculations, and display. Data validation should ensure correctness before addition, and all operations should pass arrays as arguments.

The user interface should be well-designed with access keys, tooltips, tab order, and an exit menu item. Separate forms should include the main form, Add New Employee, Lookup Employee, and Review Years of Service. Incorporate error trapping, Option Strict On, and clear naming conventions. For extra challenge, implement font and color dialog boxes, create a procedure to update employee records, include department selection via a list, chart years of service with star graphs, use context menus, enable lookup by name substrings, and filter open file dialogs to show specific file types.

Paper For Above instruction

The task involves creating a comprehensive employee management application that processes employee data stored in files and maintains records within the program using structured data types. This application builds upon previous exercise functionalities with enhancements to use structures, dialog boxes, file operations, and graphical representations, emphasizing modular programming, validation, and user experience.

The core of the program centers around a structure defining an employee record, which includes key attributes such as Employee ID, Name, Phone Number, Department, Year Started, Salary, and Years of Service. Utilizing an array of 100 such structures enables efficient storage and management of employee data. Transitioning from parallel arrays to structured data simplifies data handling and improves code clarity, maintainability, and scalability.

The application must facilitate adding new employees, validating all input data rigorously — ensuring, for example, that Employee IDs fall within 1000-9999, Year Started is within a reasonable range, and that only valid department selections are made. Validation procedures should be modular and reusable, passing data validation functions as arguments and preventing invalid data from entering the dataset.

Displaying employee information involves a list of employee names, contact numbers, and departments, which can be viewed within a list box or list view. The user should be able to review and compute each employee's years of service, which involves calculating the difference between the current year and the year started, and storing this value within each record.

An essential feature is identifying the employee with the highest years of service, requiring a procedure to traverse the data and determine the maximum. Similarly, the program calculates the average years of service across all employees, providing insights into employee retention and experience.

File operations are a significant aspect of the program, with functionalities allowing users to open existing employee data files (.txt and .dat formats), save the current data to a specified location, or append to existing files. Dialog boxes (OpenFileDialog and SaveFileDialog) enhance user interaction, and proper formatting of the file content ensures data integrity during read/write operations.

The program emphasizes modular and maintainable design through procedures and functions segregating core functionalities: adding records, editing records, validating input, performing lookups by Employee ID or name substring, generating reports, and printing with print preview capabilities. Proper error handling, user prompts for saving unsaved changes, and confirmation before critical actions enhance robustness and user experience.

For user interface design, multiple forms are employed, including the main form, an "Add Employee" form, a "Lookup Employee" form, and a "Review Years of Service" form. This separation ensures clarity and ease of use. UI features such as shortcut keys, tooltips, tab order, font and color choices, and context menus contribute to an accessible and efficient application.

Extra challenges offer opportunities to extend the program: adding font and color dialog boxes that influence the printed report's appearance, creating visual charts (e.g., star graphs) of employee service years, and deploying context-sensitive menus. These enhancements foster a professional, interactive, and visually compelling application.

In conclusion, this project demonstrates advanced skills in structuring data with records, modular programming, UI/UX design, file handling, graphical representations, and exception management. It integrates multiple programming concepts to produce a robust employee management system that supports data integrity, user flexibility, and insightful reporting.

References

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