ContactsManager

Overview

We are flooded with torrents of digital communication in our daily lives. Email, telephone calls, instant messaging, Skype calls, Tweets, and a myriad of other communication sources contribute to a sense of overload. Not only must we manage this communication, we must also keep track of the various contacts with whom we communicate. A Contacts Manager does just that for us: it maintains a list of known contacts with all of their important contact information (names, numbers, addresses, notes, etc). In this programming assignment I implemented a simple contact manager using QT framework as a complete and polished Graphical User Interface.

Supported Operations

This GUI application supports the basic operations needed for a contact manager.

• Visualization of all contacts: the application starts up showing all contacts by first and last names, email, phone number, free-text notes. The user is allowed to order the list of contacts by field.
• Single-contact visualization: the user is allowed to click on a row of the mangaer to view a single contact. This visualization gives the option to delete the contact and modify it.
• Insertion of new contact: the user can create a new contact by clicking on Add new button.
• Contact persistence: the GUI saves the contact list persistently on a Postgres database using APIs provided in this directory on an Apache web-server.
• Contact tagging and tag search: the user is allowed to associate tags to contacts and can filter contact visualization by tag.
• Contact editing: when the user views a contact, he can edit it as well.
• Full-text search: the user can enter search terms to filter contact visualization to contacts with those terms in one or more fields.

Implementation

The GUI was implemented using QT in C++. Trying to follow MVC pattern.

Model

The model has been implemented in the TableModel Class and contains all the data of the contacts manager.

It provides methods to get, set, modify, sort and delete contacts using Downloader and SortFilterProxyModel classes.

Controller/Delegate

Implemented in MainWindow, it handles the ui containing some widgets and cooperate with the model being able to receive user's input.

View

Qt provides view widgets such as QListView, QTreeView, and QTableView. Each of them has its own special way of representing data items. For the purpose I opted for QTableView.

Screen shots of the GUI

Build

Requires Qt 5.9.2 (or later, not tested in previous versions)

IMPORTANT In tablemodel.h you have to change variable IP with your own server IP!

#ifndef TABLEMODEL_H
#define TABLEMODEL_H
#define IP "<insert IP>"

Then you also need to change:

$dbname      = "dbname = <insert here your db name>";
$credentials = "user = <insert here your user name> password=<insert here your psw>";

in all the postgresphphscripts

OSX

If there is not any path to your installed qt in echo $PATH, set it like this:

        sudo nano .bash_profile

        and add:

        PATH=“/usr/local/path-to-your-qt/bin:$PATH”

        export PATH

Else clone the repository and in the source code directory:

        qmake -makefile

        make

        open ContactsManager.app

QDarkStylesheet was used for a better looking GUI (highly recommended) and can be found in this GitHub Repo

Future developements

Try implement Dynamic persistence to allow users to asynchronously edit the contacts database indeed active GUIs should dynamically update whenever changes are made.