VB Project

This Virtual Placement Agency Application, designed with VB6 to incorporate internet access (via Active Server Pages) with a client based application. The application was deployed using a 3 tiered architecture and MTS . The project was developed and taken through a full software development life cycle from its inception to its transition to the client.

The project required a user  to enter his skills into the application. The application would match the skills with possible jobs. This was a challenging application that pushed our team to it's limits.

Technologies Used

The Applicant form listed all Applicants and their individual skill sets. Skills could be added or removed on the Skills tab from a pre-existing list of industry skills.

The position form listed all job positions from the various companies. Each job position has status information. Each position has a profile listing various characteristics.

The Place Applicants Form would match Applicants with open job positions based on matching skill sets.

Active Server Pages (ASP)

Several Active X DLL’s were created in Visual Basic to be used in referencing classes in the web page. These DLL’s were accessed by using the capabilities of ASP pages. One of the main advantages of using Active X DLL’s is that they include code that can be reused. When creating a web oriented front end, the functionality that the classes performed in Visual Basic can be exploited in order to create the same functionality over the internet. A developer can create libraries of code that can be reused in current and future projects, making for faster development.

Retrieving information from the database onto a webpage is very similar to retrieving information for a VB application. An instance of the business class is created by referring to the DLL previously created. All properties and methods of the Data class are available for use. Specific information can be requested using SQL statements depending on the contents of the database.

Information can be sent to the database from the webpage in a similar way, the business class is referred to and it uses ODBC capability. Information is entered in HTML then send to the ASP page to be processed.

One of our ASP pages. The user their Applicant ID, to apply to the system.

This is the code for our Active Server Page. It is embedded within HTML code within % tags.

Deployment Using MTS

The Virtual Placement Agency was developed around an n-tier architecture. This enabled the deployment in a test environment across separate machines. The application was complied into the three components: User Interface, Business Services, and Data Services. With Visual Basic, these were created with their respective EXE and DLL files and then deployed under MTS. One of the most interesting features of MTS is it’s capability of deploying an application so that clients have access to applications via the internet. Essentially, the VB application created for the Virtual Placement Agency was set up on all of the clients computers. The DLL’s were registered on the server and along with the necessary Active Server Pages and databases. Using Microsoft Transaction Server, the application was made functional to all clients.

An additional requirement for the project was to respond to an Request for Proposal. Here is a link to our Response to the RFP. Also to document our project, GUIDS documentation was required. Here is a link our GUIDS document.

The following is an example of code used in the skill form to instantiate and retrieve skill data from the database.

Option Explicit
Private mobjSkillDb As New cSkillDB
'local variable(s) to hold property value(s)
Private mlngID As Long 'local copy
Private mstrSkillName As String 'local copy
Public Function GetAllSkills() As Variant
GetAllSkills = mobjSkillDb.RetrieveList
End Function

Public Property Let SkillName(ByVal strNewSkillName As String)
'used when assigning a value to the property, on the left side of an assignment.
'Syntax: X.SkillName = 5
mstrSkillName = strNewSkillName
End Property


Public Property Get SkillName() As String
'used when retrieving value of a property, on the right side of an assignment.
'Syntax: Debug.Print X.SkillName
SkillName = mstrSkillName
End Property



Public Property Let ID(ByVal lngNewID As Long)
'used when assigning a value to the property, on the left side of an assignment.
'Syntax: X.ID = 5
mlngID = lngNewID
End Property


Public Property Get ID() As Long
'used when retrieving value of a property, on the right side of an assignment.
'Syntax: Debug.Print X.ID
ID = mlngID
End Property



Private Sub Class_Initialize()
Set mobjSkillDb = New cSkillDB
End Sub

Private Sub Class_Terminate()
Set mobjSkillDb = Nothing

End Sub

Public Sub Save()
Dim vntDetails(1) As Variant

vntDetails(0) = mlngID
vntDetails(1) = mstrSkillName
mobjSkillDb.Save (vntDetails)

End Sub

Back to IT Projects