CSC207 Group Project

This project was completed for CSC207H1 during the Summer 2020 term by Murray Smith, Melody Yang, Riya Razdan, Louis Scheffer V, Callan Murphy, Tingyu Liang, Jinyu Liu, and Tian Yue Dong.

The Trade System

The Trade System is a program that allows users to view and trade items with each other

Setup

1. Download the source code and open the project in IntelliJ. Navigate to 'src/Main.java'. Then, run 'Main.main()'.
2. The interface is of this program is a Java.swing GUI. To navigate through the program, first choose your preferred language: English or French. You will then be able to create a new user account or login either as a user or as an admin.
3. The relevant menu can be accessed and all functionality will be available at this point.

Features

User

If creating an account, you will have the option of being a regular user or a “browse-only” user, the latter having the same functionality except you will not be able to make trades. An added feature is Metropolitan Area Selection, in which you can select the closest area in which you want to make trades. This area can later be changed, and you will only be able to see other users who are located in the same region. Upon login, you will have access to the user menu:

• View items and wishlist
  • You can view your current items and wishlist, request to add an item, and remove items from your list or wishlist.
• View user stats
  • Here you can view items borrowed, items lent, frozen status, number of incomplete trades, number of weekly transactions, most recently traded items and your most frequent trading partners
• View other users in your area
  • You can select a user to view, and from there you have the choice of sending them a message, viewing their items and requesting a trade, and adding their items to your wishlist.
• View pending trades
  • You can view your pending trades after selecting a specific trade
• View dead trades
  • You can view any dead trades that didn’t reach completion
• View trade requests
  • You can view any trade requests sent by another user
• View completed trades
  • All completed trades will be visible here
• View active temporary trades
  • You can view your active temporary trades after selecting a specific trade
• View messages
  • Each message is accompanied by which user sent it and the date it was sent
• Set active status
• Change metro area
• Request unfreeze
  • Unfreeze requests and reports for users not showing up to a trade are viewable by the admin in view messages

Admin

Admin Login Menu:

• Set borrow/lend threshold
• Set complete trade threshold
• Set incomplete trade threshold
• Add a new admin
• View current threshold values
• Edit or undo a trade
• View all users
  • You can select a user and then have the option to send them a message, view their states, remove an item from their wishlist, remove an item from their inventory, or freeze the user.
• View messages
• View item validation requests

Desgin Patterns

We implemented:

• Strategy for login logic. We had multiple different ways of logging in and wanted to make logging in extensible and avoid duplicate code. This also encapsulated the login process and helps with security concerns in the future. Used In usecasepack's ValidateLoginStrategy and it's child classes.
• Dependency injection throughout our use-case layer and controller/presenter layer to ease dependencies between classes. We use UseCaseGrouper and ControllerPresenterGrouper to hold and distribute all of our instances.

We chose not to implement:

• Observer pattern because we did not find any points in our program where we wanted to separate our real-time causes and effects. We considered implementing it for our now-deceased alert system, however we scrapped that system because it violated clean architecture.
• Facade pattern because we payed close attention to SRP violations in our code, and thus did not recognize an antipattern for Facade (A single class responsible to multiple actors). We considered applying a Facade pattern to our UserManager use case, but we decided instead to split up the class into many smaller Use Cases responsible for different things in the program, as the facade we would have implemented here would quickly have bloated.
• Builder pattern because there are no single instances complicated enough to warrant their own class for building. We considered implementing a builder for our TradeSystem class, but we decided that one of TradeSystem's main purposes is to link together the controllers, presenters, and gateways in our program, which is not conducive of a builder. Additionally, we did not need to encapsulate the construction of the TradeSystem class as it was overall fairly straightforward (one line of code in main).
• We had considered implementing a factory pattern for our now-scrapped alert system, however we decided to get rid of this system because of clean architecture violations.
• We did not find semblances of antipatterns for the other design patterns (Adapter, Iterator, Abstract Factory)

What's new

MANDATORY EXTENSIONS:

• To undo an action taken by a user, create a user account and request to add an item. Relogin in as an admin and approve of the item. You can now also choose to remove that item. If you create a second user, add an item and propose a trade by viewing the original user's profile, you can also remove an item from a user’s wishlist or cancel a trade. The admin can also cancel any trade request created by a user, uncomfirm a trade request that was previously accepted by both users (this will put the trade back in trade request queue for both parties to accept), and undo a completed trade. Undoing a completed trade will return all items to their previous owners and reset stats but will not revert a user's wishlist (items on a wishlist are removed if user's received the item through trade).
• To see a trade suggestion, create two user accounts and have them add items approved by the admin then have each other’s items are added to their wishlists (done through viewing users in your area). Then a suggest trade option is available.
• To be a browse-only user that doesn’t need to make any trades, select the browse-only option at the top of the “create an account” page.
• To change any user threshold, log in as an admin and click on the threshold change menu buttons. New thresholds can be confirmed by viewing the “view current threshold values” button in the main admin menu
• To change the account status as a user, log in as a user and choose the change active status in the user menu to let other users know that you are currently inactive and cannot make trades

OPTIONAL EXTENSIONS:

• GUI using Java.swing
• Home City: when creating a new user account, you have the option of choosing from a list of cities in which you want to trade. Once logged in as a user, this location can be changed. If another user is created with the same chosen city but then later changed, the list of other users in your area (main menu for users) will no longer show that user.
• Extra admin Functionality: Admin's can message users, as well as view all user profiles and take additional actions there.
• Multiple languages: From the beginning itself, you have the choice between using the trade system either in English or in French (which is set up such that it can be extended to any other language).

IMPROVEMENTS FROM PHASE 1: In addition to mandatory extensions, we have implemented many changes to the design of our code to make it more extensible, follow Clean architecture better, and improve the "SOLIDity" of our program. Here are a few of these changes.

• Our UI! We decided to implement a java swing UI that wraps over our existing code. We had to significantly refactor and de-couple our controller/presenter stuff from our input/output logic, as this was necessary for the previous text-based UI. As a result of this decoupling, our UI can now be switched out for a different UI (an app, for example) with ease.
• We have removed our alert system entirely. In phase 1, much of our functionality for responses from users (trade requests, for example) were implemented via an Event based system we dubbed "alerts". We really liked this system, as it made our program very easy and intuitive to use. Unfortunately, when trying to separate our controller/presenter classes (and our alerts) into distinct clean architecture layers, we found that one of two things kept happening
  • Our alerts would exist in multiple layers of clean architecture or
  • we would have to handle our alerts using a massive chain of "instanceof" statements, as polymorphism was not possible while folowing the clean architecture rules. We had a tough decision to make, and we decided to prioritize the extensibility of our project over the usability and novelty of the alert system. This was tough, as it required us to add many new options to our system to cover the bases that the alert system was previously covering for us, but we believe that now that we are rid of alerts, our system is more extensible and follows clean architecture and object oriented principles better.
• We created a new use case class (ItemManager) to fix coupling and SRP issues in our old UserManager. Based on our TA's feedback, we determined that UserManager was responsible for too many different systems, so we decided to split it up into two classes, UserManager (now just for user functionality) and ItemManager (for item stuff). This has made our code significantly more extensible and adding features to Item management has been a breeze in phase 2 as a result. In particular, undo actions for the admin have been a very easy to extend because of this.
• The presenter method that retrieves lines from our txt file originally required 2 int index to print a specific line (eg. printMenu(25, 24 ). That design choice quickly caused a readability issue in our code as it wasn't very intuitive for viewers to understand what it meant. To remedy to the problem, we've created an enum class (Frame.java) that stored constants, each representing the name of the frame. The idea is to have store the text we need to display on a specific frame(window) in a indexed text block that has it all(Check GuiMenu.txt in phase2/data). This way, when we need to add text, we can just go to that specifix index block in the GuiMenu.txt file and add new lines or look at which line we're referencing. Now the code looks like menupresenter.getText(Frame.MAINMENU, 2) instead of menupresenter.getText(12, 2)
• We have packaged our code by layer, meaning our usecases, controller/presenter code, entities, and GUI are all in seperate packages.

Authors

Tian Yue Dong, Jinyu Liu, Murray Smith, Melody Yang, Riya Razdan, Tingyu Liang, Callan Murphy, Louis Scheffer V