2014-01-17 - Budgeter Project part 3.5

I originally planned to do a post for each stage of the project but it turns out that when I get coding I don’t really feel like writing afterwards. They are fairly similar activities and I only have so much creative juice to go around. In the future I will likely leave the writing till long after the program is done and just put it on the writings page, separation of coding and writing.

I do want to give some updates on the project though. Part 1 was the database planning as I posted earlier and that’s never going to be done. I’ve changed it a bunch since I “finished” planning and will likely change it more. Part 2 was the DataViewer prototype application, which is mostly done. It needs a bit of clean up and re-organization but it does what it’s supposed to do. Part 3 is the program itself and that’s going along nicely. I’ve been using it for a few months and it’s been working out well. There’s a few features that I still need to add but the base functionality is there. To carry on from the last post here is a diagram of the current database structure. It has changed a fair bit.

Database table map

Speaking of databases, one welcome side effect of the program is that since all my transactions are in a database I can run queries against them. I wanted to know how much I’ve paid on my student loans recently and I was able to do a simple select from transactions where description like “%NSLSC%” query which game me all transactions that mention the NSLSC. It’s always nice to be able to do things easily.