employee-tracker

Homework Challenge 12, Due January 12

About this Challenge

Developers frequently have to create interfaces that allow non-developers to easily view and interact with information stored in databases. These interfaces are called content management systems (CMS). Your assignment this week is to build a command-line application from scratch to manage a company's employee database, using Node.js, Inquirer, and MySQL.

In order to install inquirer, please use npm i inquirer@8.2.4.

Because this application won’t be deployed, you’ll also need to create a walkthrough video that demonstrates its functionality and all of the following acceptance criteria being met. You’ll need to submit a link to the video and add it to the README of your project.

User Story

AS A business owner
I WANT to be able to view and manage the departments, roles, and employees in my company
SO THAT I can organize and plan my business

Acceptable Criteria

GIVEN a command-line application that accepts user input
WHEN I start the application
THEN I am presented with the following options: view all departments, view all roles, view all employees, add a department, add a role, add an employee, and update an employee role
WHEN I choose to view all departments
THEN I am presented with a formatted table showing department names and department ids
WHEN I choose to view all roles
THEN I am presented with the job title, role id, the department that role belongs to, and the salary for that role
WHEN I choose to view all employees
THEN I am presented with a formatted table showing employee data, including employee ids, first names, last names, job titles, departments, salaries, and managers that the employees report to
WHEN I choose to add a department
THEN I am prompted to enter the name of the department and that department is added to the database
WHEN I choose to add a role
THEN I am prompted to enter the name, salary, and department for the role and that role is added to the database
WHEN I choose to add an employee
THEN I am prompted to enter the employee’s first name, last name, role, and manager, and that employee is added to the database
WHEN I choose to update an employee role
THEN I am prompted to select an employee to update and their new role and this information is updated in the database

Todo List

Notes

I might borrow some of the resources from Module 10 (Team Profile Generator)

So to fulfill the first WHEN-THEN statement, inquirer will need to have a menu that look something like this

What would you like to do?
- View All Departments
- View All Roles
- View All Employees
- Add a Department
- Add a Role
- Add an Employee
- Update an Employee Role
- Quit

Those last two items, look like things that can be borrowed from HW10.

flowchart TB

main_menu{What would you\nlike to do?}
view_depts(Table of dept. ids\n& dept. names)
view_roles(Table of role ids,\njob titles\nrole's dept.,\n & role's salary)
view_employees(Table of employee ids,\nfirst names, last names,\njob titles, depts., salaries.,\n& employee's manager)
add_dept[[Add Department]]
add_role[[Add role]]
add_employee[[Add employee]]
update_emp_role[[Update employee role]]

Start --> main_menu

main_menu-- View all depts. --> view_depts
main_menu-- View all roles --> view_roles
main_menu-- View all employees --> view_employees
main_menu-- Add a dept. ----> add_dept
main_menu-- Add a role ----> add_role
main_menu-- Add a employee ----> add_employee
main_menu-- Update an employee role ------> update_emp_role
main_menu-- Quit --------> Stop

view_depts & view_roles & view_employees --> main_menu
add_dept & add_role & add_employee --> main_menu
update_emp_role --> main_menu

As you can see in this flowchart, our menu is quite dense. It may be necessary to add other menus to group our tasks into separate menus. What's more, I can't help but notice that we have our Create, Read, and Update tasks, but there is no Delete task to make this a full CRUD application. We'll worry about adding additional functionality later.

Let's take into account the Entity-Relationship Diagram (a.k.a. ER Diagram or ER Model)

Note: I had to use square brackets to denote VARCHAR size because mermaid would not accept parethesis. Also, the bonuses are not mapped out in these diagrams. UH OH! The ER diagram is not rendering on this page!

erDiagram
    department {
        INT id PK "department id #"
        VARCHAR[30] name "department name"
    }

    role {
        INT id PK "role id #"
        VARCHAR[30] title "job title"
        DECIMAL salary "role salary"
        INT department_id FK "what department this role is in"
    }

    employee {
        INT id PK "employee id #"
        VARCHAR[30] first_name "employee's first name"
        VARCHAR[30] last_name "employee's last name"
        INT role_id FK "what is their role"
        INT manager_id FK "who is their manager (if they have one)"
    }
    employee ||--o{ employee : manages
    employee ||--O{ role : assigned
    role ||--o{ department : assigned