Library Management System (LiMS)

Library management project made for 1st year CS102 Lab course at BIT Mesra. Completely written in C.

Explanation of file structure :

• main.c implements basic application code.
• logger.h and logger.c provide basic logging functionalities.
• fileops.h and fileops.cprovide basic read write function for complex data to file. Used by book and library modules.
• book.h and book.c handles read/write functionality for single book data.
• library.h and library.c handles create/read/update/delete (CRUD) functionality for whole library database.
• booklist.h and booklist.h handles events for items in book list.
• addbook.h and addbook.c handles events for add book button.
• dialog.h and dialog.c provides a way to display messages like a popup.
• appstate.h and appstate.c provides a struct that can be accessed globally throught the project.
• menu.h is not being used in project!

Build Instructions

Windows

• Install msys2 for 64 bit on your system. Perform pacman -Syyu in msys terminal to update repos and packages.
• Install gtk4 for mingw.
• Install cmake.
• Confirm whether pkg-config and make are installed or not.
• Create build directory in cloned folder.
• Goto build directory in msys terminal and do cmake .. -G "MinGW MakeFiles" && make -j2
• Copy all .ui files from ui directory in project root to build directory.
• Run main executable.
• All Done!

Linux

• Install gtk4, cmake, make and other dependencies from your package manager.
• Create build directory in cloned folder.
• Goto build directory in terminal and run cmake .. && make -j2
• Copy all .ui files from ui directory in project root to build directory.
• Run main executable.
• All Done!

Common Methods/Conventions Used Throught Project

• When saving a string data in file, first we store the size of string by dumping a size_t variable that contains size of string and then the string is written to file. This makes it easier to determine the actual string size beforehand and we can allocate exact memory required to string to be loaded before reading it in memory.
• Most of the memory allocations done are dynamic (use of malloc).
• Create and Destroy functions are implemented for structs like Library and Book in order to handle automatic destruction in one call.
• This means when a Library struct is destroyed, all Book structs and data inside these Book structs are destroyed.
• Whenever reading/writing data from/to a file, always check the size of data read/written and compare with the actual data size. If the size does not match then raise an error by calling LogError.
• Before dumping a block of data, for e.g. Book data, a signature LIMSBOOKSTART is written and in the end, end signature LIMSBOOKEND is written. This is to mark the start and end of a Book data block. Although this is not necessary, this can give hints whether the data is altered/tampered or not. Similary when dumping library data, LIMSLIBDBSTART and LIMSLIBDBEND signatures are used.
• There is a global appstate maintained throught the project. This struct is used to access data that can be required by any function and is hard to pass in callback functions.

The code is heavily commented itself and with a little effort it'll be easy to understand what's being done and why it's being done that way!

Copyright

To the extent possible under law, Siddharth Mishra has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Library Management System. This work is published from: India.