Employee travel authorization form

The goal of this project is to create an employee travel authorization form for our

computer science department web site in order to properly account for official travel of the

employees. The main aim of this project is to automate the submission of travel authorization

process and avoid the existing method of e-mail submission. This will probably save employees

time and e-mail space.

The project aims at creating a database for the travel forms and connecting it to the

employee travel authorization form. We are going to connect the database design to the

employee travel authorization form through java object/relational mapping; transaction

management and connection management of the database through hibernate. The measurable

outcome of this project is the creation of database and making sure that the data that the user

enters in the form is properly updated in the database. The user authentication is pretty

important module as we are going to use the university database of users to access the

database that we are creating. The access level of the database and the user access restriction

should be properly maintained.

In order to properly account for official travel, employees should make sure that the

online Travel Authorization Form is completed and approved before travel is taken, even if no

WKU reimbursement is involved. This approval must be obtained through the Dean of the

College and, if travel outside the Continental U.S. (OCONUS), by the Office of the Provost and so

we must make sure that they have their restriction in accessing their respective forms.

The technologies that we use are JavaScript for the purpose of designing the Travel

Authorization Form, MySQL for database design and java for object mapping through hibernate.

The university user authentication will be provided by LDAP which contains more descriptive,

attribute based data.

The major milestones of the project are the Travel Authorization Form design and the

creation of the database. Once these two processes are completed, the next milestone would

be integrating the database to the forms; by using java object/relational mapping through

hibernate which also facilitates storage and retrieval of java domain objects.

Why we are using hibernate?

We are using hibernate to provide the database and configuration data to persistence

services (and persistent objects) to the application. To use Hibernate, it is required to create

Java classes that represents the table in the database and then map the instance variable in

the class with the columns in the database. Then Hibernate can be used to perform

operations on the database like select, insert, update and delete the records in the table.

Hibernate automatically creates the query to perform these operations.