CSS 341 - Machine Problem #5

Problem Solving with Arrays

Working with Email Programs, Word Processors, and Spreadsheets

Due time: November 28, 2009 at midnight

They are back! The Keystone Daily has just awarded us another contract to develop solutions for their management. The editors at Keystone Daily want us to deliver a system helping them analyze the emails they received from their field reporters. Here are the details:

Keystone Daily field reporters send random emails to their editors whenever they feel happy. The editors read all their emails with Microsoft Outlook, and save all the emails from the reports in a Microsoft Outlook Data file (.pst). At the end of each month, the editors go through all these emails and for each email, the editors need to know:

1. Who sent the email
2. On what day of the week was the email received (e.g Monday, or Tuesday, or etc)
3. The date and time that the email was received. The editors are very particular that the month must be spelled out (as in November, and not 11).
4. The subject of the email.
5. An alert if a specified character string is contained in the body of the message.

Finally, the editors want to generate a report where the above information must be printed out in nice format in a Microsoft Word Document. This report should sort the emails based on the time of day at which the emails was received. For example, if two emails arrived one at 14:34:22  on Monday and another at 9:14:42 on Tuesday, the editors want the “9:14:42 on Tuesday” entry to be printed in the report before the one for the “14:34:22  on Monday”.   If two emails arrived at the exact same time (hr, min, sec), the editors do not care which email is printed first.

For example, here is an outlook data file that contains emails sent by field reporters and here is an example of  the report the editors want for the top-level directory. Our job is to write a VBScript program to automate the above routines for the editors.   Note that this report is only for the e-mail messages in the upper level directory or folder of this data file (the Input directory).  There may be several nested subfolders as well, each with their own e-mail messages.  We have seen in class how to open each of those folders and print out the messages from them.

The Keystone Daily Chief Financial Officer is disturbed about the costly information systems contracts that have been issued to us.  In response to his concern, we have negotiated with the Editors a limited version of the program actually desired (pts 1-4 above).  The Editors are willing to accept a program that only lists the e-mail messages (in all folders and subfolders) without the alert for the character string in the body.  They hope that the fact that it fails to print out such alerts will go unnoticed by upper management.  But, determined to show that we “produce more for less,” we have agreed “under the table” to try to meet the actual desired specification (pts 1-5 above), expecting most favored treatment from the Editors on their next contract.

Here are additional specifications from the editors:

6. When our system first starts, it should ask the editor to select and open an outlook data file (*.pst) containing the emails from the reporters.
7. The program must then process the emails in the top-level folder in this data file, and sort them according to the received time. Now, the editors are very particular and insist that we use Microsoft Excel to perform the sorting operation.
8. Our program must then generate a properly formatted Microsoft Word document that contains the information specified in pts 1-4 above.
9. The program must then do this in-turn for each subdirectory found in the *.pst file, preparing a separately sorted report for each folder.
10. To receive our preferential treatment in the future, the program should also ask the editor for a character string and add an alert to the printout for any message that contains this string in its body (pt 5).  Note that to accommodate the editors’ typing, the search should not be case sensitive.

This programming assignment contributes approximately 12.4% towards your final grade for this course.

Hint:

• Outlook data file (.pst) and the folder contained in the file may have different names. In this case, you can assume the file name and the folder name are the same. E.g., if the file name is FolderOfJunk.pst, you can assume the top-level folder name will be “FolderOfJunk”, if the file name is MyJunk.pst, then you can assume the folder name is “MyJunk”, etc. 
• The VBS Split() function is useful in parsing file names.
• Bodies of e-mail messages are found as the .Body property of   the MailItem object on outlook.
• You should probably use arrays to store the various data. 
• One way to sort is to sort the indexes of the data fields and then just rewrite them in the sorted order.  (did in class)
• Note that you do not need to report any part of the message body – just the alert that searchstring was found there.
• Remember from class:  The common dialog file opener works just fine, but the intrinsic FileDialogOpenBox does not work from Outlook.  If you want to use the latter, you need to open excel or word from your program, then use the FileDialogOpenBox to open your file, and then close the unwanted excel or word application. 
• Finally, it is suggested that you first get the entire programming working for pts 1-4 above (the upper level directory), then add the capability of moving through the subfolders, and finally add the string searching functionality.  It would be much better to meet the contract and fail to get the future preferential treatment, than to miss the entire deadline trying for pt 5 above.  This recommends a style of software development where it is important to produce intermediate functional results before the final product.
  
  

Intermediate Reports

In order to complete this project on time and correctly, your team will need to plan meet milestones.  Accordingly, I am requiring the following to be turned in at the MP5 Catalyst drop box at times before the final product is due.  Be sure these preliminary submissions are labeled as such, so that I do not confuse them with the final products at grading time:

1. By noon, Friday, November 20 you are to submit a document for the team dividing up the overall project into logical tasks and assign lead responsibility for each of these tasks to one of the team members.  These separate tasks should include the various software modules you will develop.  Conceive the overall project in terms of these modules and assign responsibility for each.  Do not assign one member overall development responsibility.  I want to know who is taking the lead on each part of the code.  As well, there should be responsibility for integrating the modules together and testing the integrated package.
2. By noon, Wednesday, November 25 you are to deposit drafts of code segments that the team has developed.  Each module is to indicate who has done primary development on it.  The code segments are to be assembled into one document or vbs file – I don’t want more than one draft submission, labeled as such.  The content will not influence the grade – your degree of progress may do so, however.