Welcome to the Merkle's Employees Award System! We hope that this system will be able to assist you and your employees in creating a successful growing organization with the best and happiest employees. 

Note: This is just Prototype 1. There is no database integration and the data provided are just dummy data. Please bear with us. You will see a more advanced EA system in our up and coming Prototype 2.


Installation Instructions:
1. Please extract the two files (images and JAR file) from the EA zipped file and save them together into a folder.
2. Run the EA system by double-clicking on the EA.JAR file.
3. Enjoy!


User Manual:
1. The EA system begins with the SwitchBoard which offers users a selection of options. For the pilot phase, the tool starts off with 2 features: 1) Nominate Employees, and 2) Vote for Winners. The ‘Nominate Employees’ feature allows all levels of employees to access and requires no user authentication at this point.

2. To begin with, the employees may just need to select and click on the ‘Nominate Employees’ icon button or the text link. The ‘Vote for Winners’ feature is only for selected employees who chairs the role as voters. User authentication is required. Similarly, to vote, the employee may just need to select and click on the ‘Vote for Winners’ icon button or the text link.

3. As voter, since the Prototype 1 has no database integration yet, hence, the password is hard coded. All voters can access the "Vote for Winners" page with the following username and password. Please note that the user identification and password authentication is case sensitive.

			Username: Merkle
			Password: nidimi

4. The ‘Nominate Employees’ page allows all employees to nominate any outstanding employees for any available and relevant awards. For each selected award, there will be subsequent description at the "Award Description" text area.

5. Once the user has identified the award for nomination, the user can then select nominees from the list of employees from the ‘Nominee’ comboBox. The user will be required to fill in the “Comments” textArea and state the rationale for nominating this person. 

6. Once completed, the employee(s) can process the submission by clicking on the "Submit" button. Alternately, user may click the “Cancel” button to cancel the submission and return to the “Switchboard.”

7. From the “Switchboard”, the user will be redirected to the “Log-in” page, if he/she selects “Vote for Winners” from the previous “Switchboard” to vote for the nominations. Please use the log-in name and password provided in step 3 to access the "Vote for Winners" page. The "Forgot you log-n or password” link and the "Remember" checkbox is currently not working. Please stay tuned for the next prototype.

8. In the "Vote for Winners" page, similarly, for every selected award, the text description of the award will be shown in the non-editable “Award Description” text area. The "Select Nominee" feature works as a filter to assist user in reviewing the submission of nomination for the specific awards. Once selected, the dataGrid will display the information from all the nominations for the specific (selected) employee. We are still currently working on this feature. The information displayed are just dummy data.

9. Finally, after reviewing the entries, the user (voter) may select his/her vote by selecting the desired employee from the “My Vote” comboBox. The similar list of employees nominated for the specific award will be listed in the “My Vote” comboBox.All fields are required before submitting an entry. 

10. User may click on the “Submit” button to submit entry. Alternately, user may click the “Cancel” button to cancel the submission and return to the “Switchboard.” The user may log-out from the EA System by clicking the “Log-out” button.

Thank you for using the EA system!



Java Source Code Descriptions:
The JAR application includes the following classes.

Award.java
This class is the owner of all award related data. Any GUI that needs any Award information has to call methods in this class. This class will support returning one specific award, a list of awards or adding new awards. Currently the class has the possible award values hard coded into it, which will be changed with the introduction of the database in proto type 2. The GUI user will never interact with this class.

DrawFave.java
The main purpose of this class is to draw an image. The class contains a method which is called by SwitchBoard.java class that enables an image to be drawn on the GUI. . The GUI user will never interact with this class directly.

DrawLogo.java
The main purpose of this class is to draw an image. The class contains a method which is called by NominateGUI.java & guiVoteForWinner.class that enables an image to be drawn on the GUI. . The GUI user will never interact with this class directly.

DrawNominateicon.java
The main purpose of this class is to draw an image. The class contains a method which is called by SwitchBoard.java class that enables an image to be drawn on the GUI. . 	

Employee.java
This class is the owner of all employee related data. Any GUI that needs any Employee information has to call methods in this class. This class will support returning one specific Employee information, or a list of all employees. This class does not and will not support adding new Employees into the solution. That will be managed by the database in the future. Currently the class has the possible employee names hard coded into it, which will be changed with the introduction of the database in proto type 2. The GUI user will never interact with this class.

guiVoteForWinner.java
This class creates the GUI which helps mangers (users with access) to vote for winners based on a list of employees nominated for awards. This class currently calls methods in the employee class and in the award class. In prototype two this class will call the Vote class to add the manager’s vote into the solution. Currently the class hard codes values out of what should be the nomination class. For prototype 2 the class will also call the Nomination class.

isPasswordCorrect.java
This class currently contains a method which is called by the LoginGUI class. This method checks the password entered by the user against a hard coded value of “nidimi”. For prototype 2, this class will be deleted and replaced by validate user name and password method in the Employee class.

LoginGUI.java
This class creates the GUI that the user encounters if they select the navigation option to vote for an employee. Based on the application business rules only managers with valid user name and password are allowed to vote for award winners. Therefore, the application only allows valid users to enter the vote for an employee form. This class invokes the isPasswordCorrect.java class to validate the password, the user name is currently hard coded into this class as “Merkle”. For prototype 2, the hard coded elements of this class will be removed and the class will call a method in the Employee class to validate both the user name and password from the database.

NominateGUI.java
This class creates the GUI which helps users nominate an employee for an award. This class currently calls methods in the employee class and in the award class. In prototype two this class will call the Nomination class to add new nominations into the solution.

SwitchBoard.java
This class creates the GUI that a user encounters when he launches of the jar code. The main purpose of this class or GUI screen is direct the user through the system. This class will currently initiate the LoginGUI.java and guiVoteForWinner.java classes depending on the user navigation choices.