Customer Requirements:
Your customer, StockWatch Data Services, Inc. (SDS), is an information services
company that specializes in providing stock market information to brokers and fund
managers. SDS receives a large volume of data every week in the form of ASCII text
files automatically downloaded from mainframe computers around the world. Their
request is for an application, which will allow operators in the company data center to
load the data contained in these text files, perform visual verification that the data is
correct, and upload verified data to a central database server. The application must
meet the following requirements:
The application will be deployed on a Microsoft Windows NT4.0 network
accessible by up to 50 users, all of who will be working from desktop computers in
the data center.
Data downloaded form mainframe computers around the world will arrive on the
operators’ computers in the form of text files attached to electronic mail messages.
The text files have the file extension .dat
Each file will contain data from one particular market, for example NASDAQ or
the London Stock Exchange, although each file might contain data for a number of
funds.
The text files will be in standard 8-bit ASCII format and will consist of one
header row detailing the source market and the file date, and any number of data rows
in which the fields are delimited by fixed column widths, as illustrated in test.dat
The text files often contain duplicate lines, lines with zero price values, or lines
containing corrupted data, and the application needs to ensure that such lines are
filtered out, and only valid data lines are loaded into the application
The application should allow users to load the text file, and then display all of the
fund names contained in that file in a list
When the user choose one of the fund names, the price data for that fund will be
displayed in a line graph for visual verification that the data appears correct
Once the operator is satisfied that the data contained in the text file is accurate, he
or she can upload it to the central database server
This server runs SQL Server 7.0, located within the data center domain
This server will be handling updates from all of the installations of our
application, as well as requests for data from other applications
To each row append to the database, two additional fields will need to be added
to enable an audit trail of the uploaded data: one to record the upload date, and
another to contain the name of the user who uploaded the record
Duplicate records should not be allowed on the table
Once the data from a text file has been loaded into the application, it can be saved
in the application’s own document format
The application documents will be retained as an archive
The operator will be able to load any number of .dat files into the application so
that several text files can be merged into one upload transaction and one archive file
The customer has specified that this is to be the first of several applications that
will append records to a database
