Java: En Guard Call Tracker

I haven’t been able to create any personal projects for java programming recently but thankfully the workplace creates them for me. One thing our technical support department has always lacked is the ability to keep track of what each call was about so that if that customer calls back we don’t have to recreate the wheel. I do know that my company is working on purchasing just such a program but that will be at least a year in the future. So recently I created a poor man’s call tracking system for only our technical support group and not the entire call center in general.

I named the program En Guard as I was playing with the GoldIcon program to create icons and one of the ones I liked best was a shield with swords on it, rather medieval looking. It sounds much better than the original name of “Technical Support Call Tracking System”. This program will save all call information into a text document, Microsoft Word, with the documents organized by subscriber number and saved into a central location on our network. The call information itself that is asked for is very basic: name, subscriber number, contact information, representative and product version. Beyond that the topic of the call is recorded and entered before the record itself is created and saved.

This program went through several versions before a working one was produced. The most difficulty part was getting the program to read a file already on the network and save any updates accordingly back into the same file. Thankfully something similar was done with the AMAS program so as in that program a FileWriter/Reader was created. The entire program consists of two files; one for the main window with the buttons at the bottom and the other for the panel containing the variable information. Each document is setup the same way with the variable information at top followed by the contents of the call. So the FileReader reads and erases the customer information one piece at a time to fill in those fields then takes the rest and places it into the “Current Record” field. In order for this to work the spacing of the information had to be hard coded into the system, which wasn’t the most elegant way but is effective. The Platform and Entered By fields are also hard coded into the program, so if this were to be altered for someone else’s use the basic code would need to be altered.

With this program, unlike the other ones, I was able to obtain some feedback from my colleagues to make it more user friendly. The suggestions taken were setting the JTextArea fields to accept word wrapping, automatically adding the current date to the record, adding a separator between record entries rather than a simple newline character and last but not least a skin chooser. The skin chooser was more of a joke one of my colleagues threw out at me as he didn’t like the color I had picked, light goldenrod. But I took it as a challenge and it turned out to not be as hard as originally expected. Making sure I caught all of the setBackground calls in the skin chooser method was a bit tough, but perhaps that was more because I was trying to do it manually since the entire program is about six hundred lines of code. In order to change the program’s skin I did have to ask for the RGB values, which of course no one knows off the top of their heads.

Overall not the most difficult program I’ve created however it has been very useful in the workplace, being used several times a day. Some updates do need to be made, specifically that a skin can be used that obscures the JLabels as they are defaulted to black, a record can be overwritten without prompting the user if that is really what they want to do and the Platform and Entered By fields don’t need to be hard coded. I’ll get to all of these in the future, but for not the program is working quite well for our limited needs.