I need a project.

[Brad]

I'm not trying to steal focus from the picture project. We usually don't have much focus anyway.

I'm planning on using this project so to learn WPF and C#. If you want to do a the web interface (in Flex or PHP or whatever) that'd be really awesome. If so, we should get a database schema figured out so the programs can talk to each other.

So yeah, I guess I've hijacked your thread, given myself a project instead of helped you think of one and stolen focus from Courtney's picture project. I suck.

[Nick]

So yeah. It happens.

So what would the database need?

• Movie:
  
  
  • Title
  • Plot summary
  • Personal Rating (one to 5 'stars')
  • Running time
  • Headlining actors
  • Director
  • R,PG, etc rating
  • recommended (whether or not you want to recommend this movie to others.)
  • Public Profile (Do you want the unwashed masses knowing you like/watched this movie)

We will need similar things for books and CDs with slight differences, like books will have a page count rather then running time, author rather the actors and so on.

For the movie part, if we want it to be able to show what movies are popular on within the system we will need a static movie database (borrow some from IMDB perhaps) to stop there from being errors or variations on the titles stores (most all movies are in that database, but we could have a manual add for obscure movies.)

[Brad]

You could build your movie/book database as people add movies or books. To get them to enter in correct information we can make a scrapper which pulls of information from imdb or wherever.

So a user puts in the title (or partial title) of a book they want to add the program first checks it's own database to see if that movie has already been added otherwise it checks imdb shows the results scrapped of imdb's webpage and says "Is this the movie you are trying to add?" If it isn't found the user can enter all the information manually.

As the whole point of this program is a "tracking" program (tracking what movies you own, have watched, lent out, etc...) everything is going to need a status field and a watched/read/listened to field. Various statuses might be "owned", "borrowed", "lost","not owned","lent", etc... The watched/read field is separate as you their may be movies/books you don't own and have watched/read as well as movies/books you do own but haven't watched/read.

[zourtney]

There are a lot of better options out there for music library management. I'm primarily using iTunes at the moment. It's not awesome, but it's functional enough. I'm just looking for a wish-list to hold a list of bands and descriptions. If this is not similar enough to the movie/book thing, oh well.

[Nick]

Same idea, just less information to save to that type. So having bands as well would be easy and nice.

[Brad]

I made a UML diagram. In the open office version of Excel of all places. I can't find any other software that easily lets me write inside of rectangles and draw lines. Anyway I haven't actually tried this in the actual version of Excel but it looks correct in the Open Office one.

Let me know what you guys think. Feel free to add/modify/delete anything in this file and upload it again.

UML Diagram

[Nick]

I'm sure google has an online equivalent that will allow collaborators. That seems to be their thing. That and spewing ads into the ether.
But cool,  I will take a look at it and post back after a bit.

[zourtney]

I don't think this has been mentioned, but this program could be useful for tracking video games. We loan and borrow these often, too.

[Nick]

Oh noes! Just call it media magnet. Or something to that effect. Tracks and indexes your media wants and desires.

[Brad]

Awesome Idea on the Video game tracking.

[Nick]

I agree. We might as well. So similar to everything else we just have to add another category. We could even add tools to the list. Those get loaned out, and sometimes you want to know if you have a 7/32 socket without going and looking (and you might like to know what sockets are missing and need replaced.)

[Brad]

I sent both of you an invitation to edit a google docs version of the UML. Unfortunately I can no longer draw lines to show associations so you'll just have to figure those out on your own I guess.

[zourtney]

Some ideas and questions. And yeah, some of these might over-complicate the design and undermine the program's usability:

• What is "score" and why do only movies have a "rating" field? Is this the same thing or different?
• Adding "series" to movies, games, and books could be useful, esp if we are going to use this as a "wish list."
• How am I tracking the loaned/borrowed state of media items?

[Brad]

Score is what you personally rate the book/movie/video game (i.e. 2 out of 5 stars). Rating is the actual rating of the movie/video game (i.e. R,PG-13,etc...)

Series sounds like a good idea, it could be as simple as adding a string data field to the book,movie and games tables.

Well the status field could be set to "Loaned" or "Borrowed", but we need another field to specify who you loaned it to or borrowed it from.

[zourtney]

Ok, that rating thing makes more sense now.

As for the loan/borrow state, why not just have a field for each and just slap a user ID in (or whatever)? It's the same amount of data, but it allows for tracking that awkward situation where you loan out something you've borrowed from someone else! It does happen, you know.