Senior Project - Information System to Support Setting of Insurance Policy

[k3n3dy]

Hello everybody! I am new to the group so first of all I would like to
greet everybody here.

Now to my topic - The title of the topic is the title of my
undergraduate senior project which I have to produce in C# using
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional and Microsoft SQL 2005. The
database server is set up to work only on the local machine.

I would like to ask for major help on the project since it is a matter
that I am not well acquainted with! I am assigned this project and
told to use the above specified language and environments!

My biggest problem is that up to now I have mostly used C++ as a
programing language for my assignments and these assignments were
homeworks which were much easier than the current project. I have
little experience with C# and a bit more with C++. I am also on a
tight schedule for delivering the final project.

So far I have built the skeleton of the database with all the needed
fields and tables including the relationships between the tables. I
have also built the graphical interface of the project through the
Design View window of Visual Studio 2005. It compiles without errors
(it is simply the GUI that is generated).


To do list:

1. What bothers me are several complicated formulas which I have no
idea how to code in C# (I have included them in a file which I would
provide at the end).

2. Also since I have never done a complicated program which interacts
with a database I have no clear idea how I should program the data
entered in the graphical interface to be saved and extracted to and
from the database.

3. It is not very clear to me how am I going to take the needed data
from the database and feed it to the formulas and then how should I
display the output from the formulas - should it be first stored to
the database or should it be directly somehow displayed into the
graphical interface?

4. I have problems in finding how to export the created with Access
2007 database into a Microsoft SQL file - I have been told that it is
possible to export the database to a file and then by feeding the file
to Microsoft SQL server it should create the database in Microsoft SQL
2005.

===================================================
Specification of the project:

1. Insurance risks (matter of contract arrangements) - subject of the
contract between the insurance company and the customer or the person
insuring a beneficiary

- Field showing the risks against which the insurance is covering
loses - death of the customer or the beneficiary, medium injuries -
breaking of body parts or other physical damages, minor injuries
- Field showing the sums which are paid to the customer depending on
the type of loss - death being paid the most, medium injuries covering
up to half the amount of death injury and respectively minor injuries
being covered up to 10% of the total insurance amount
- Field where it would be specifically stated whether the customer
himself/herself is subject to the insurance or if he is having a
beneficiary
- Field for the name of the person making the contract on part of the
company
- Field showing the periods for which the insurance would be in effect
- Field for the fee that the insurance company would require for the
particular type of insurance
- Field for assessment of risk performed by an expert and
automatically generated risk percentage based on previous data

2. Claims on the bases of contracts with the company
- Types of claims - death injury, medium injury, minor injuries.
- Additional field is included in support of the above field where the
employee of the insurance company could enter details on the
particular insurance claim
- Field for the name of the employee handling the claim
- Field in which the amount claimed should appear depending on the
given reason for claim
- Field for entering the name and or other personal information of the
insured person (this could be used to search for the contract of the
particular customer)
- Field in which copy of the signed contract should appear

3. Calculating the price of the insurance on the basis of historical
data
- Data for the frequency of money paid on this type of insurance
policy (this would be realized through the use of a database)
- Data on amounts paid on the particular insurance policy (this would
be realized through the use of a database)


Note: This particular software has the purpose to assist employees of
an insurance company in signing contracts with customers and to help
the agent in allocating the best for the company and the client
respectively fee for the insurance policy which is in question. By
using this software the process of signing contracts with customers
should become as worry free as possible. This product also has the
option to assist an employee in satisfying the claim of a customer in
the most correct way and with the best amount according to the
contract signed.

========================End of Specifications=================

Additional info on the database:

For the database I have used Access 2007 to build the initial database
and its tables and fields including the relationships. It is a simple
database! It has only 3 tables (if you open the database file you
would see that there are more tables but they are the initial tables
which I then used to create the table named: "All table data
together". At some point I should remove the small initial tables
since they are not relevant, the only important ones to the final
database are: "All table data together", "Customer Info" and
"Employee".



Resources used:

I have taken the book: "Wiley - Wrox - 2005 - Professional C# (III
Edition)" which covers Visual Studio 2003 - is this a problem or is it
still good to be used as a reference? If it is not good enough what
would you recommend instead of it?!

I also use the Help documentation that goes with the MSDN in Microsoft
Visual Studio 2005.

Can you recommend any additional resources that I could use for my
project. Some similar project somewhere on the web maybe?

Thank you for your time and support!

I would continue to work on the project but any help is highly
appreciated!!!

The whole project and the work done so far (457 KB). The fields in the
database are based on the formulas needed.

LINK: http://rapidshare.com/files/67448126/Senior_Project_-_in_progress.rar.html

Best regards,

k3n3dy

 

[bob clegg]

Hi,
You have two basic options here as I see it.
1) Quick and dirty
2) Do a structured application.

VS2005 has ways of quickly tieing data to the GUI. Option 1.

A more structured 3 tier approach would be having a data layer,
business logic layer and your GUI.

Given that you have already invested time in the GUI and appear to be
on a tight time frame then you may find option 1 appealing.

Given the scope of the project my initial reaction was option 2 but
this is probably not realistic starting from scratch in the c#
knowledge stakes.


Anyway beneath either option there is some commonality which will be
of use to you. Note: This is not the only or the most efficient way to
skin the cat but it works.
Putting your faith in your data structure. i.e. The tables and views
you have created. Make ' typed datasets' one for each table and view
that you want to interact with.
These provide the functionality of moving data to and from the
database. They also handle normal updates of the exposed data by the
user.

Once you have these, Option 1 becomes very inviting because with the
VS2005 server explorer window and datasources window you can drag
these datasets onto your form and get an instant grid that shows the
entire table or a set of fields that represent one record.
Read the built in help for the finer points on how to do this.

So you may want to throw a blank form into your project and quickly
checkout that the data is presented and behaves the way your are
expecting.
i.e. pretend to be the business logic. Choose the input data using the
GUI, manually enter the output data and save.

The business logic will need a number of classes that can implement
the formulas and react to what is happening on the GUI.
No difference between languages here.

You may need to build a state engine to handle the decisions being
made by the user.

The whole thing sounds like it is going to be GUI event driven. i.e.
User choses from List A, enters a figure in Field B, gets a calculated
result in field D. Pushes a button to accept or not etc.
Check out the help on validating user input.

I am a bit concerned that you state there were a number of small
tables that you have combined into one big table. If you where given a
starter database then those tables probably represent a normalised
view of the data. A table called "All table data together" is scary
indeed. A table in a relational database such as Access should
represent one thing. e.g. Your "customer info" table hopefully only
has details about the customer and no policy information in it.


hth
Bob