Thread: Building a Calender with Automated Employee Vacation Planner - Questions.

Hello forum.

A friend of mine asked if I could create an application for her, and I said I would look into it, however I have a bunch of questions.

But first, let me introduce you to the project-to-be, and the backstory.

Every year, she has to plan when her employee's can go on vacation for the summer holidays - MANUALLY. It takes weeks to solve the puzzle, because she has several kinds of employee's hired, with different skills. And at all days there must be X amount of employees with skill1 at work, plus Y amount of employees with skill2 etc, and they also need special "off-days" in comparison to when they last worked and so on. It's quite the math puzzle.

So, I would like to help her out! But I'm not that into Java - Yet!

I've worked a little with C#, and built a prototype of a Support System (Ticket based), so I got the basics down of programming, and I know Java and C# are quite alike, so I don't think making the switch will bother me that much.

The program should be easy to use for her, so it needs a visual calender that can be interacted with, and it should also be easy to see which employee is at work at that date and so on.

My question is:
How much help can I expect to get from your community here? I don't want you to build the program for me, but I expect to need some serious guidance on different topics? Can you accept that here, or is it not okay?

Will it be hard for me to build this kind of Calender, that allows the interaction I want?

Do you know of any open-sourced projects, or libraries that will make my task easier?

I plan on using NetBeans IDE for this project.

I will talk to my friend later tonight, and get some more specific info, but so far, do you think this is possible for a newbie with your guidance? And are you willing to help ?

What I'm aiming for is more of a back-and-forth with you guys, where I'll work till I hit a bump, then I come here to ask for help solving it, and then back to working again.

Thank you for your time. I know at this point, the thread is very vague, but I'm excited to see how it unfolds, and hopefully you will be a part of it (:

Welcome to the Forum! Please read this topic to learn how to post code correctly and other useful tips for newcomers.

What you describe, the type of support you have in mind, is exactly what we do here. Helping you design and pointing you to 3rd party libraries that may be helpful is hit or miss, depending on someone's personal experience doing similar things, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

That's amazing to hear!
Now, when I want to update with whatever progress I may have made, do you guys prefer a new reply to this thread, or should I just edit the main thread?

I'm really looking forward to learning a bunch of new stuff, and also to experience this kind of back-and-forth relationship. Thank you for the quick reply.

I hope to get started on the design part tomorrow, but no promises as this is on a hobby-basis ^^

My recommendation is to start a new thread for each topic. You'll have specific questions, one or two at a time, hopefully get those resolved, and then you'll move onto the next. Each of those conversations to resolve a question or two should conclude within 10 - 20 posts. Threads that go much longer than that become a 'personal project' for an individual but are largely ignored by everyone else, and that's probably not what you want.

Ah, okay. I can follow that. Thanks again for your help.