The Ocean City, NJ Multiple Listing Service (MLS) wants to update their system to help their clients – the Ocean City realtors. We are going to focus on a part of the realtor business that is very important in a resort town – the rental business. We are to develop an integrated database application that will keep track of houses for rent, renters, home owners (landlords), as well as the realtors themselves.
Functionality provided should include:
· User friendly interface(s) for data input for each kind of data
· User friendly interfaces for update/delete for any kinds of data subject to frequent updates
· Menus leading users to the capabilities that they can make use of
· Support for some pre-planned reports and queries. An initial specification of desirable queries/ reports is given below.
We will talk more about this project in upcoming weeks. Your first task is to hand in a survey to aid me in assigning people to compatible groups. This should be done ASAP (today!). Note that the DB design is Due Oct 19, and the completed project is Due Dec 7. The will be a handout later on project deliverables.
Tentative
Queries / Reports:
For Realtors:
a) show all prospective renters that are working with me.
b) Show all homeowners/houses that I’m the listing agent for (primary person handling renting).
For Realtor Management:
Reports
a) Show all houses rented by our office within the last Y days, with subtotals by agent
b)
Show all houses/owners currently listed with our office
a) show all houses rented (or listed for rent) by a particular agent (agent X) within the last Y days.
For Realtors in Support of Prospective Renters:
a) show houses listed for week starting on X, with Y bedrooms, and Z blocks from the beach
c) show houses for rent for a particular week (Z), with rents between X and Y, within N blocks of the beach
d) possibly a more flexible interface for other specialized searches in addition to the above, or at least allow dropping into Access to do specialized searches not listed above (e.g. I NEED air conditioning)
For Realtors in Support of Landlords:
Queries:
b) show houses rented (committed) for the week starting on X, with Y bedrooms, and Z blocks from the beach (comparables?)
Always remember when designing output that these are designed to help humans. Thus, for example, if the primary key value is not meaningful to humans, that other identifying info should be displayed in addition/instead. E.g. In addition to or instead of Owner ID, display owner name.
Many of these should be “parameterized” in order to be flexible. Some, but not all, of the queries that should be parameterized are indicated with X,Y,Z etc.
These are tentative. If you find any of these that are problematic, check with me. Also, if you think of any great additional canned queries/reports, feel free to include them.