Design and Implementation of Student Attendance
Management System Based on MVC
He Zonggang
Department of Computer Science and Technology
Neusoft Institute of Information
Dalian, China
hezonggang@neusoft.edu.cn
Abstract—Based on the modern technology of MVC and
J2EE study, Multi-layer structure of J2EE which has been
realized by FreeMarker, WebWork and Spring has been brought
forward, the student attendance management system for all
college students which based on MVC has been designed and
implemented in this paper. This will use for reference for other
Web Applications system based on J2EE platform.
The system is controlled by WebWork while data or status
and logic process are enforced by “Action”. Default interceptors
and interceptors were used to decide whether or how to carry out
the “Action” before “Action” was executed. Interceptors were in
use to complete a series of security, and logs and calibration
work. To receive a dynamic data from WebWork is by using the
technology of FreeMarker in the performance. Many macros
were defined to unify the style of system pages, reuse of code
duplication and improve efficiency. A light weight tool called
“Spring Ioc Container” is used to manage “Service” in the
business logical layer. And JDBC Template is used for blocking
some complex areas from database and decrease the complexity
of its process.
The system has been preliminary run in campus by testing and
debugging. The result indicates that the direction of this
technology study is correct and the design of this program is
essential.
Keywords-Student Attendance Management System; MVC;
WebWork; FreeMarker; Spring
I. BACKGROUND
As the rapid growth of educational system in China, people
now have more demands on teacher’s knowledge level and the
way of teaching method including both hardware and software.
However, the management of teaching method receives more
demands than others. Gradually the existing student
management system cannot meet the needs of teaching
management, mainly manifested in the following aspects:
(1) The various management systems quite is isolated,
which cannot guarantee that these teachers who engage in the
teaching work and those teachers who engage in the student
work simultaneously to grasp student’s situation of life and
study and student’s thought tendency.
(2) System has not provided the corresponding service for
the student, truly has not achieved student-centered.
(3) Expansibility is poor. With the Institute of expansion
and the number of students increasing, the original system
cannot meet the need well.
(4) Data security is bad. Data security cannot be guaranteed
because there is no independent database server.
978-1-4244-4639-1/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE
Zheng Junsheng
Department of Computer Science and Technology
Neusoft Institute of Information
Dalian, China
zhengjunsheng@ neusoft.edu.cn
In order to satisfy those demands and provide relative
services for both teachers and students, as well as to create a
high efficient and convenient environmental in campus, a wide
range use of Web system for all college students becomes a
must.
II. THE DESIGN OF SYSTEM WEB APPLICATION
FRAMEWORK
The system uses Multi-layer structure of J2EE which has
been realized by FreeMarker, WebWork and Spring. The
Framework will realize the MVC pattern of development,
allowing low coupling degree of presentation layer, business
logic layer and database server layer, realizing a small amount
of code can be modified to complete changes in system
functionality and database server.
A. Presentation Layer
1) Page Resources Layer--HTML+CSS+JavaScript
Three technologies have been used in page resources layer:
HTML performs structure of document, CSS defines style of
document and JavaScript decides behavior of document.
HTML is the most common page element markup
language, used for the presentation of document structure. Its
shortcoming is to mix data content with its presentation, which
undoubtedly increase the difficulty and workload of
development. Therefore, the system will minimize the use of
HTML.
CSS is used to control a display style of interface elements
and define the style of the document.
When the static pages are identified, their specific behavior
will be achieved by JavaScript. The scripts which are written
by JavaScript are used to response page events which are used
to interact with the user and carry out input data validation.
2) Page Template Layer-FreeMarker
The presentation layer is realized by JSP in traditional Web
development. Although JSP is very powerful, but also often be
abused and lead to some undesirable consequences, such as
logic and the presentation will be mixed together, undermining
normal decomposition of the responsibilities of artists and
programmers, so that it is difficult to read and maintain JSP
pages. Therefore, the presentation layer is implemented by
FreeMarker in the system.
FreeMarker is a template engine: a generic tool to generate
text output (anything from HTML to autogenerated source
code) based on templates. It's a Java package, a class library for
Java programmers. FreeMarker is designed to be practical for
the generation of HTML Web pages, particularly by servlet-
based applications following the MVC pattern. The idea behind
using the MVC pattern for dynamic Web pages is that you
separate the designers (HTML authors) from the programmers.
But Java programs prepare the data to be displayed, and
FreeMarker just generates textual pages that display the
prepared data using templates.
Working mechanism of FreeMarker is shown in Figure 1.
Template
<html>
… Attendance Management System records and statistics the
Hello
${name}! Output
… records attendance information while teaching. Counselor may
</html>
<html>
<Free … information. Students can also be online searching for personal
Marker> Hello John!
…
Java
… Students, teachers and counselors are the main users of the
data.name=’J
ohn’
… information of students whose they are teaching in the current
Figure 1. Working mechanism of FreeMarker
B. Controller Layer WebWork
The controller layer of the system is designed by WebWork
framework. WebWork is a kind of MVC framework.
ServletDispatcher instantiates a new ActionProxy, which is
responsible for request processing. ActionProxy invokes
interceptor before it invokes real “Action”. Interceptors
intercept the request being sent to and returning from the
Action. Once execution of Action is complete, the request is
sent to a result to render the results.
The function of WebWork can be listed as follows in the
entire system.
First, user’s request is encapsulated to a data object.
Second, according to different requests, the corresponding
logic processing unit is called.
Third, result is returned after logical processing unit has
completed
Finally, combination of data of Result object and pre-
designed presentation is displayed to user.
C. Business logical layer and data persistence layer
Business logic is responsible for the calculation and
treatment of business logic. Data presentence is that attributes
of objects will be saved before the end of the life cycle of
objects. Business objects are managed by Spring framework in
the system, using Spring JDBC Template simplifies the use of
JDBC.
The role of Spring is mainly manifested in the following
aspects.
First of all, It can manage business logic(Service) of the
system.
Second, Dependence which is needed by Service can
directly be injected into the Service.
Third, it can declare transaction management.
Finally, JDBC operation is simply encapsulated by JDBC
template.
III. THE ANALYSIS OF ATTENDANCE
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
A. function description
student attendance information, and realizes on-line registration
and on-line query. Teacher logs in on the teacher machine and
on-line search for attendance information of his classes at any
time, and verify 、 statistic and summarize attendance
attendance records.
B. use case analysis
system. Students can query their coursed attendance
information. Teachers can record and query attendance
semester, and modify them according to the special information
(sick leave, personal leave, etc.)provided with by counselors.
Counselors can query various courses attendance information
of students whose they are responsible for in the current
semester. Counselors and teachers can verify the special
circumstances of the student information.
IV. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF SYSTEM
A. System module division
The modules of attendance management system include
importing course-plan, adding, modifying, querying, verifying
and summarizing attendance information.
B. Design and Implementation of system
1) Presentation Layer
Templates are in fact programs you write in a language
called FTL (for FreeMarker Template Language). This is a
very simple language designed for writing templates.
A template is a mix of the text、Interpolation、FTL tag
and comment.
Code of duplication will be extracted to build a macro in
order to optimize the code structure and reduce maintenance
costs while the page is written by FreeMarker. Macro of
FreeMarker is a template fragment associated with a variable
which is used through the user-defined instructions in the
template. Through FreeMarker macro, the system page's style
can be unified, reuse of the duplication of code, be conducive
to modify the whole style of the page. It is must that modifying
definition of macro while modified rather than adjust one by
one.
 2) Controller Layer
WebWork actions are the central unit of programming in
WebWork. Actions are responsible for both holding
data/state(in the form of getters and setters) and executing
logic. Actions are required to implement the
com.opensymphony.xwork.Action interface.
a) Action
Two base class of Action are created in the project, one is
BaseAction, the other is AnonymousAction. Actions are
required to inherit BaseAction when it is need to log in for
user. Actions are required to inherit AnonymousAction when it
is not need to log in for user. A lot of methods are defined in
BaseAction. These methods are used to get logged-on user
name, user ID, the user object (Map), user agencies and
departments where the number of such information.
In addition, taking into account common problems of Web
projects, BaseAction some of the public parts will be extracted
to build the CommonBaseAction class that will complete return
page of common results、get basic environmental information
and paging.
The relation among BaseAction 、 CommonBaseAction
and Action is shown as the following:
public class CommonBaseAction implements Action
{……}
public class BaseAction extends CommonBaseAction
{……}
When you want to create a action, first of all to create a
Java class, named XXXAction (for example, AttendAction)
inherit BaseAction, then to define variables, variable type, and
then to create the corresponding get and set methods and the
necessary business methods. Action is defined as follows in
general:
public class AttendAction extends BaseAction {……}
The system will call the corresponding Action in
accordance with the configuration file. Therefore a
configuration file of the Action should be prepared. The
configuration file of the AttendAction is shown as follows：
<action name="attend"
class="stumis.action.attendmis.AttendAction">
<result
name="attendMis">attendmis.ftl</result>
</action>
When the result of AttendAction is “attendMis”, the page
named “attendmis.ftl” is redirected.
b) Interceptors
There is a special object named interceptors which wrap
around the execution of the action and the result in WebWork.
Interceptors allow you to do some processing before and /
or after the action and result are executed, and they also let you
modularize common code out into reusable classes.
Interceptors have been called before Actions are
executed.Interceptors determine whether the implementation of
Action or how to implement the Actions. They can complete a
series of work as security, log and check and so on.
Two interceptors are defined in the system except for built-
in interceptors of WebWork, one is the LoginInterceptor, the
other is ExceptionInterceptor. LoginInterceptor prevents non-
logged-on user access. When the user does not log on and
direct input a page address, intercept mechanism will work and
redirect the login page. Only when users log on successfully,
the corresponding page will display. Its working principle is the
first interceptor to determine if there is no inheritance
Anonymous interface, log on directly to the Action.
ExceptionInterceptor is mainly to prevent some illegal
operation caused by abnormal, such as upload files too large
anomaly caused by a null pointer and so on.
3) Business logical layer and data persistence layer
In this system the Spring Framework Service realize the
business logical layer, through JDBC Template to complete the
data processing of the persistence layer.
a) Service
The base class of service named CommonBaseService is
created to set log and access to database. When we call Service
to complete the business deal, we often encounter the problem
of wrong Service name. A class named ServiceManager is
defined in this system, in which get and set methods of Service
are set up in order to be able to accurately call the required
Service.
A Service named BaseService which inherit
CommonBaseService is created because each Service is
required to obtain ServiceManager. BaseService created
getServMgr method used to obtain ServiceManager.
XxxService achieves specific functions inherits BaseService in
Persistence layer, such as:
public class XxxService extends BaseService {……}
b) Spring JDBC Template
Spring JDBC Template is the most important class of the
JDBC core package. It simplifies the use of JDBC, which deals
with the resources to establish and release. It can help
developers avoid some common mistakes, for example, forgot
to close the connection. Spring JDBC Template can run the
core JDBC workflow, developers only need to provide SQL
and extract results. The class can complete query/update /call
stored procedure. It can simulate the iteration of results and
extract return value. It can catch the JDBC exception and
convert them into a common Exception defined in
org.springframework.dao package.
The part of code is only required to implement the callback
interface in accordance with a clear definition of a group of
contracts. The callback interface named
PreparedStatementCreator creates PreparedStatement and
provides SQL and any necessary parameters. The interface
named RowCallbackHandler get value from each line of data
sets.
c)Transaction processing
The system uses DataSourceTransactionManager of Spring
as the transaction administrator. The code associated with the
transaction management is not directly appeared in the Service,
instead of using a declaratory management.
TransactionProxyFactoryBean is used to designate transaction
management objects and their methods. Transaction
management will use transactionAttributes to automatically
designate methods.
V. CONCLUSION
The paper aims at the research of Web technology, as well
as the attendance management system based on the campus
network for all college students is implemented. The student
attendance management system will guarantee the teacher and
the counselor can gain timely and quickly the attendance
information of students. The system has been successfully
applied in campus by testing and debugging. This will provide
a new way to strengthen the student management.
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