Project MIS 324 Professor Sandvig

The term project is to add enhancements to your on-line music store. This is your opportunity to be creative!

Enhancement ideas
Instructions for turning in project
Project grading

Make sure that you have the basic music store working properly before you start on enhancements. Enhancements are of little value if they are added to non-functional sites.

Tip: Before starting to work on enhancements that could cause existing code to malfunction, I suggest that you make a backup copy of your project in a separate folder.

Some ideas for enhancements are listed below. You are also encouraged to be creative and come up with other ideas.

Upgrade the graphical appearance of your music store.
Add a shopping cart status box (see XML Music).
Add a listing of "visited pages" so the user can easily get back to previously viewed items (see XML Music).
List best sellers based upon data in tblOrderItems (see XML Music).
Recommend music to customers based upon their interests. (see XML Music).
Add caching to the category menu, searchBrowse page, or product page. (see XML Music).
Validate city-state-zip code combinations by looking them up in a zip code database. A zipcode database containing over 42,000 city, state, zip codes is available for your use on Yorktown (see checkout in XML Music). The connection string in the web.config file has the syntax:
<add name="ZipCodes" connectionString="Data Source=yorktown.cbe.wwu.edu\dsciweb;Initial Catalog=Zipcodes;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=ZipcodeReader;Password=zipGuest" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />

NOTE: This database is behind WWU's firewall. To access it from off campus you will need to have a VPN established on your computer.
Add CD track listings from Amazon.com (see XML Music).
Add Lightbox, Highslide JS or other JavaScript tool for displaying images.
Add a professional web design theme on your site (SmashingMagazine.com recommendations).
Add AJAX functionality to your site. (This will rquire some creativity. Amazon web services are too slow for Ajax. It could possibily be used in the checkout.)
Add customer product reviews on the product page. To prevent bots from posting span this also requires a CAPTCHA verification image. See XML Music and reCaptcha Sample (source). To use the sample code you will need to download the recaptcha.dll from Google and put it into your bin folder. Google "recaptcha asp.net" for the .dll file. The Google code has a couple of minor problems which I have corrected in the sample code.
Create a customer wish list. Ideally the wish list will persist between sessions and be available from any computer, requiring that the wish list items would need to be written to a database (similar to the shopping cart). See Amazon.com as an example of a wish list.
Validate that customer email addresses are unique before writing them to the database. The sample site uses a custom validator. The validator's handler calls a method of the checkout class named "EmailIsUnique." This method executes a sql query that counts the number of instances for the email address, excluding the current CustID. If the count is > zero the validator reject the email address.
Create administrative pages for managing customer and order information. This could include the ability to edit customer information, an interface for managing order status (shipped, partially shipped, returned, etc.) and adding new products to the database. (Note: In MIS 424 this is done using the SQLDataSource controls, which are very convenient for this task).
For other ideas look at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other sophisticated shopping sites.

Include a list of your enhancements in your "About this store" section so that I don't miss any when grading your assignment.

2. Instructions for turning in Project

The project is due at the date and time shown on the course schedule. Late projects will be subject to a penalty of one letter grade per 24 hours (so don't be late!).

Send your music store URL to:

Professor Sandvig at csandvig@wwu.edu
cc a copy to yourself

3. Project Grading

The project will be graded based on the basic store created in assignments 7, 8 and 9, plus any enhancements that you have added. The basic store that you have completed by the end of assignment 9 will earn a grade of approximately a B-. Enhancements are a way for your to further improve your grade.

The grading of the final project is very detailed and includes looking at your source code to make sure that you have coded efficiently and neatly. Specifically I will be checking to make sure that you have used user controls for all code that is reused, that your browse menu is dynamically generated and that you code is original (your own work).

Project grades will be posted on the class web site.