TrcAttendance

Attendance Logger - Tool to log students' participation in meetings.

In our team, each student is required to participate a minimum number of hours of meetings during the build season in order to participate in competitions. At our meeting place, we put out a laptop with touch screen at the door running this program. Each student, when walking in, will select their names on the check-in list and click the check-in button. When leaving, they will select their names in the check-out list and click the check-out button. This allows us to keep track of the minutes they have attended meetings. The program keeps track of this info in an Excel spreadsheet which can sum up the total hours of each student if needed.

To minimize the amount of typing required when starting a meeting session with the program, it is recommended to compile this program to a jar file and put it into the same folder where the log data files are stored. On the Windows desktop, it is recommended to create a shortcut that contains the following line in the Target: field:

java -jar TrcAttendance.jar log=<LogFileName> place=<MeetingPlace>

where:

<LogFileName>   - The file name of the log data (e.g. Frc2016Attendance.csv). The log data is in the format
                  of an Excel CSV (text file with fields separated by commas).

<MeetingPlace>  - Specifies the default meeting place.

The parameters are optional. By specifying them, the program will start with the correct log file opened and the meeting place filled in.

In the Start in: field of the shortcut, put in the location of the folder where the jar file and the log data are stored.

In the Run: field of the shortcut, select Minimized. This will cause the command console associated with the java program to be minimized.

With the above recommendation, you can create multiple shortcuts on the desktop. For example, we have both an FRC and FTC teams. We created two shortcuts Frc2016Attendance and Ftc2016Attendance each has different parameters specifying a different log file and meeting place.

Updates

• Added transaction support: all check-in and check-out events are now written to a transaction log. This will prevent data loss if the program is terminated unexpectedly in which case the restarting of the program will read the transaction log and redo all the transacted events.