Pulsar Consulting | iActivityTracer

iActivityTracer

iActivityTracer is a tool allowing to keep trace of all kinds of activity periods within a company, like holiday, illness, recuperations, office, customer site, training. This application allows to know why, when and where persons are present or not.
It can be completed with another Pulsar tool, inFlowTracerPro, allowing to know on what and how they work (tracking and allowance of the tasks, perfomances, etc).

More Information

Please find the full application here (restricted access).

Application Scope

Employees can post requests for holidays, see a planning of their own activity periods and consult their remaining budget in terms of vacation still to be planned.

External collaborators (like freelances or consultant) can post their holidays (without budget restrictions) and see a planning of their own activity periods.

Managers can manage all activity periods, presence and leave for employees and external collaborators. They can accept or refuse requests for holidays, allocate time budget and set the activity for a period (for example when a user is ill). They have an overview on all users’ activities and requests, as well as extra screens for administration.

Technology

The iActivityTracer application was built using Pulsar's Framework called GID/GIDPro.
GIDPro is initially an assembly of several top market open source libraries forming together a consistent development and runtime platform.
This framework allows rapid application development (RAD) of Web applications being coupled with relational databases. in an extensible, modular and reliable architecture. It includes a wizard and a repository for registering easily all page items, actions and navigation links.
Other standard technologies used in the development of this application are:

XML and HTML to provide the content with CSS and Javascript to render the pages
STRUTS providing the link between the application logic, database and the presentation layers
Oracle database + PL/SQL Developer to manage the database
Oracle Jdeveloper and BC4J to provide the ORM layer
Eclipse IDE
Sybase PowerDesigner to design the DB schema and generate the database
Tomcat as the application server; Apache was the web listner & HTTPS server
An LDAP directory service provides the User Authentication Repository

Main Concepts

USER ROLES (PROFILES) The application distinguishes 3 types of users who do not have the same rights for demand and allocation:

Employees: they have no right on allocation and can only propose or cancel a demand for holiday, according to their remaining budget.
External collaborators: same rights as the employees but their holidays are not restricted by a budget.
Managers: they cannot enter a demand but they can accept or refuse a demand and assign any other activity type. They will also manage the time budgets and the list of users. If necessary a database administrator may add an activity type in the database itself.

TIMETABLE The timetable allows to define for each worker the exact repartition of the day of a working week, specifying how many slots of an hour will be worked in the morning and how many will be worked in the afternoon. The slots outside the timetable are the slots where the worker is usually unavailable. Each day being divided into 24 slots of an hour, this allows the application to manage full-time and part-time schedules as well as shift work or night work.

TIME BUDGET The time budget allows specifying for each user how many slots of an hour can be assigned as vacation periods during a year. This concerns specifically the following activities: normal holidays, shifted legal holiday and recuperation days. Other activity types are not budgetable.

ACTIVITY TYPES Activity types are managed by the application database and as such are not fixed and can be extended or adapted as required. When an activity has direct consequences on the worker salary or status, the legal code is used. The default types are split into two categories:

LEAVE activity types where the worker is unavailable			PRESENCE activity types where the worker is available
(1)	(2)	(3)	(1)
normal holiday legal holiday shifted legal holiday recuperation illness non-paid holiday	VA VJ PC RA JF JF MA AA	Vacances Annuelles Vacances Jeunes Petit Chômage Repos d'accouchement Jour Férié Jour Férié Maladie et accident vie privée Absence autorisée non payée	office training on customer site
(1) Activity type (2) Legal Code (3) Legal Name

There are two distinctive axes for legal holiday. They can be fixed or flexible (that do not have a fixed date, that have a date tha can vary from one year to another); flexible legal holidays: Easter, Ascension Day and Pentecost. They can also be shifted or not shifted. A legal holiday will be shifted if it occurs during a weekend. Both fixed or flexible holiday can be shifted. Every time a legal holiday is shifted it means that a day will be added automatically by the system in the time budget at the year over.

YEAR OVER
For each new year, a new time budget must be allocated to each user, giving a provision for normal and legal holidays. Moreover the time budget remainder of the preceding year for normal holidays, shifted legal holidays and recuperation days is carried over as recuperation days.

TIME SLOT
The current minimal time unit is a slot of one hour. The maximal one is one day. So an activity is assigned either by full day or by time slots of one hour. The number of slots that constitutes one day is defined in the timetable of each worker.

Main Functionalities

The Activity Planning screen presents a global view of all activities. Managers can see a grid with all selected users while employees and external collaborators can only see their own planning.

Clicking on a user name will display the time budget details for the user (1). Clicking on a specific cell in the grid may lead to different popups depending on the user profile and on the cell content:

for employees
- The Manage Demand popup allows the employee to enter an activity demand (2). This will be submitted to the manager who will accept or decline it.
for managers
- If the cell contains a demand, the Holiday Demand Validation popup allows accepting or refusing the demand introduced by an employee or consultant. (3)
- Else, the Manage Activity popup allows the manager to assign activities to a selected person or simultaneously to all persons. (4)

The Activity Report screen allows managers to look for the activities that are allocated to all collaborators of the company. Default ordering criteria are on the user, then on date. All columns headers are active links allowing re-ordering of the results lists (alternatively ascending and descending).

The Budgets screen allows managers to search and edit allocated budgets for holidays, shifted legal holidays and recuperation for all employees of the company.

The default ordering criterium is on user, then on activity code, then on activity name. All column headers are active links allowing re-ordering the result list (alternatively ascending and descending).

Selecting an item in the result list opens the Modify Budget popup window allowing modification or deletion of the selected budget (1).

Clicking on the Add button opens the Add Budget popup window to create a new budget (2).

The Persons screen lists all the people identified in the iActivityTracer application. It is accessible only for managers. As for the budget, selecting an item in the result list opens the Modify Person popup window, allowing modification or deletion of the selected person (1). Clicking on the Add button opens the Add Person popup window to add a person in the application (2). The timetable of the person is managed in the same screens.

The Year Over screen shows all carried over holiday budgets. It is accessible only for managers.

Clicking on a row opens the Year Over popup window (3) which displays the details for a user and allows transferring effectively the user’s remaining holidays into the next year.