University Student Record Management Software

Light Speed Solutions
New Delhi, India

University Student Record Management Software (USRMS) was developed for the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, India. NDRI is Asia's second largest dairy institute and is recognized as a Deemed University. The application is used by students and teachers as well as the office staff for all activities related to the students.

A nested edit table panel in an Iron Speed Designer application.

The USRMS application maintains student details, starting with the registration of a student for a course offered by the institute. Admission is granted when the student clears the entrance test. The application tracks the student's academic progress, hostel and other information as he completes his degree courses. Various criteria like attendance, financial dues clearance, projects and assignments submitted, and internal and external marks obtained are taken into consideration before the results are declared. All criteria and validations are built into the application, making for a paperless system.

When a student applies for registration to a particular course, the university office staff enters this data in the application. Students are allotted a roll number and are informed about the admission test. Students can view their results in detail by logging in. Successful candidates are required to deposit requisite fees along with the necessary documents (a soft copy of these documents is stored in the database). Roll number, course, faculty, hostel room, etc., are all allotted to the admitted students.

As the students go through the courses, the teachers enter records of their attendance, daily and weekly assignments, minor and major projects (or thesis in case of PhD) on a daily basis. Students may view their progress online. However, they are denied access to other students' information.

Teachers are allowed to make changes in the data they enter for the next two days, after which only the department heads or the administrator can edit it. Teachers are not allowed to add, view, or edit data for a student or a subject they are not allocated.

Application size and scope

University Student Record Management Software utilizes one Microsoft SQL database, 70 tables and one view. The Student Marks table has over 200,000 records in any given academic session. Approximately 500 users make an estimated 20,000 transactions per month.

The project

The project took around two months to complete with two developers working on it. The requirements were not well defined and the university committee kept adding "wish list" items, so the first month was spent in developing and adapting the application to the changing requirements. Were it not for Iron Speed Designer, we would have aborted the project after the first two or three iterations. Both the Iron Speed Designer portion of the project and code customizations took one week each. Testing took another 15 to 20 days.

CSS menu buttons in an Iron Speed Designer application.

Code extensions and customizations

We developed some customizations for the application using AJAX and third-party controls like Telerik and Crystal Reports. The commonly used customizations include:

	Add a Record to database.
	Ajax Based Messages.
	Store Session details.
	Filter the data grid according to logged in user.

Page layout customizations

We designed three more design themes using the existing themes to enhance the themes for menus and layout. We used the Telerik window control to make the application look like a Microsoft Windows application.

Iron Speed Designer impact

Without Iron Speed Designer, we could not have developed this application in a two-month timeframe with a two person development team. The project would have been feasible, but given the changing requirements, it would have taken at least six months, and we would have wasted time prototyping. Iron Speed Designer made development of the application easy. Its important contributions are concurrence and data security, about which the university committee had major concerns. This was not a development issue with Iron Speed Designer, and we achieved it without writing a single line of code. Iron Speed Designer not only helped us do our project, it helped us get it in the first place.

Next steps

The next phase of the application will include a Staff Module. We will process all transactions relating to the university staff through the application.

About the developer

Baljeet Singh Matta
Technical Lead and Director

Baljeet Singh Matta holds a Master of Science in Software. He has been in the IT field for the past nine years. He was Project Manager with TALENTS for three years before he joined Light Speed Solutions.