jsteyn / CRMj

Contact Relationship Management System

CRMj

Contact Relationship Management System - the j is for either Java or Jannetta (or both)

I have been browsing to find a CRM that suits my needs. I found that I could either pay (commercial software) and not quite have what I need, or not pay (open source) and also not quite have what I need. Here is what I want and this application will hopefully, eventually, develop into that.

Requirements

Non functional requirements

• To be written in Java
• We'll be using IntelliJ so the directory structure will reflect that.
• We'll be using Maven
• To use SparkJava with Jetty
  • https://sparkjava.com/tutorials/jetty-request-log
  • https://sparkjava.com/tutorials/application-structure
• To use SQLite for a database
• A REST service
• A Browser user interface
• To run, like OpenRefine as a web service but on your local machine so that you do not require Internet activity and you do not have to consider all the security implications of running on public servers.

Functional Requirements

Contacts

• Capture contact information with a UUID as the primary key
• A contact will have:
  • Zero or more telephone numbers
  • Zero or more email addresses
  • Zero or more social media types (the type and its link) to be picked from a list (enumeration) eg. LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Signal.
• Contacts are of enumeration type contact_category. A contact can fall into more than one category:
  • personal
  • colleague
  • ...

Interactions

• The user will have interactions with contacts. These interactions are of enumeration type interaction_type:
  • phone
  • email
  • video (we might want to split this into video type eg zoom, teams, skype - what will be implications on design?)
  • in-person
• Interaction will also record other people that were involved in the interaction - people are selected from the contact list.
• (I might regret this later) The application is for a single user and login should only require a password.
• There should be a dashboard with tabs/links/options/buttons to add:
  • Contacts
  • Interactions - if any of the items such as contacts or interaction types do not exist, one should be able to add them from this screen, i.e. without having to reverse to the dashboard and enter new contacts, interactions types etc. from there.
  • Contact types
  • Interaction types
  • Social media types

Considerations for later

1. To add an alternative Swing (or something) desktop user interface
2. To add security via login for multi-user
3. To make provision for other databases. The design will use DAO to provide for this from the beginning.

Conventions

• Server (Java)
  • Hungarian notation
  • Private member
    • Default - m_camelCase
    • Static - s_camelCase
    • Constant - m_UPPER_CASE
    • Static constant - s_UPPER_CASE
  • Public member
    • Default - camelCase
    • Constant - UPPER_CASE
  • Avoid public members where possible (prefer getters/setters)
  • Prefer Path over File, and File over String
  • Single instance classes (like CRMjServer/CRMjProperties) should always be final (to avoid accidental overwrites of references)
  • Composite classes (like CRMjServerAjaxManager is to CRMjServerManager) should be notated as such in their documentation
• Client (velocity/html/css/js)
  • All template (and related) files are to be placed in the resources/static/ directory
  • Main page templates (such as index or login) are to be placed directly in the resources/static/templates/ directory
  • Page layouts are to be found in the resources/static/templates/layouts/ directory
    • Any html and includes (potentially) common to multiple main pages should be made into a layout
    • See index.vm and layouts/default.vm for an example on how to implement layouts with parameters
  • Includes are to be found in the resources/static/templates/includes/ directory
    • Site-includes can be considered composite structures, used to prevent bloating the main template with too much information
    • Common-includes are included on an as-needed basis wherever they are required
      • These should rely entirely on macros to avoid repetition of DOM structures
  • JavaScript files are to be found in the resources/static/js/ directory
    • These files should generally comprise of common or generified structures and functions
    • Global variables should not be defined within these files to allow multiple uses in a single template
      • Where some form of global data is required consider using a class instead