DPS923 and MAP523 Assignment 4

Assignment 4 enables you to work with Core Data technologies, location services, and mapping.

Read/skim all of this document before you begin work.

While you are doing the work, if a specific task is not clear, or it seems to require an unreasonable amount of time to complete, contact your professor.

Due Date

Monday, April 13, 2020, at 11:00pm ET
Grade value: 18% of your final course grade

If you wish to submit the assignment before the due date and time, you can do that.

It is VERY IMPORTANT to submit your work before the due date and time.
This assignment CANNOT be late.
If it is not submitted by the due date and time, your Assignment 4 grade will be zero.

Overview and purpose

The app will be of your own idea and design. This document will help you plan and implement it, while ensuring that its scope and challenge level are comparable to the professor’s standard project.

If you decide to do your own idea, then give your professor a brief (one page) plan of what your app will do, and a sketch of the app’s scenes and data sources/stores. The plan must be given to, discussed with, and agreed to by the professor no later than Thursday, March 26, 2020, at 3:00pm.

Here are the things that your app must do:

• Run on (deployed to) an iPhone device, and intended for an iPhone form factor.
• Support a navigation interface where appropriate.
• Use Core Data as a persistent store.
• Have a multi-entity model (3 or more entities), some of them related.
• Enables the app user to work with the data, for all kinds of operations (fetch, add new, edit existing, delete).
• Get initial data from either or both of an app bundle JSON file or a web API.
• Interact with one or more web APIs, one of which supports more than GET tasks (i.e. must support POST and PUT).
• Use a basic fundamental level of location services, and use location data in a meaningful form (e.g. on a map).
• Use the device camera to capture and save images.
• Implement the topics covered, and the app design approach, and the problem-solving techniques, and the best-practice guidance, that were taught in this course.
• Avoid the use of non-Apple third-party libraries and frameworks.

It’s possible that your app will do other things, and that’s OK.

DPS923 students will have a few additional specifications.

Deviations to this list must be discussed with and agreed to by the professor no later than Thursday, March 26, 2020, at 3:00pm.

Getting started

Use the most recent version of the Core Data project template as the base for your project.

At this point, the app will load and run correctly, and enable you to create and delete “example” entity objects. These objects are persisted in a Core Data store. All the base / infrastructure programming bits are provided in the template.

Build and run (and test) frequently. Do these tasks incrementally, so that you build upon success and do not leave problems behind.

Documenting your app’s features or highlights

As you do the work and complete a feature, or otherwise want to highlight something that you’re happy with, briefly document its name, description, location in the source code file(s). The document format can be text, Microsoft Word, or web. Submit that document with your project. The professor will use the document as a marking helper.

Doing the work

You can use the typical workflow plan in the professor’s standard project if you wish. It is anticipated that you will have to complete similar tasks.

DPS923 additional functionality

DPS923 students must implement the following additional functionality:

• To be negotiated

Testing your work

Test your work by running it on the simulator. Do this frequently and incrementally, after making any substantial changes. And, use the Xcode debugger to help.

When the app is complete, create screen captures. Use a naming convention for the image names.

Also, a request: Each screen capture could possibly be large. If you open the png file in the Preview app, there is a feature on the Tools menu named Adjust Size. Change its width to 400 pixels (and it will automatically adjust the height). Then save, and it will reduce the size, sometimes dramatically.

Reminder about academic honesty

When you are ready to submit your work, you will copy some of the code in your project to plain text files, so that the My.Seneca/Blackboard “SafeAssign” tool can do its job. The next section will tell you which files to copy.

From the Blackboard web site:
SafeAssign compares submitted assignments against a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works.

Submitting your work

Follow these instructions to submit your work, before the due date and time:

1. Locate your project folder in Finder (and we suggest that you make a copy for yourself).

2. At the same level, create a new folder named “MyCode”.

3. From the project folder(s), copy these source code files to the “MyCode” folder:
   ( all your controllers )
   DataModelClasses.swift
   DataModelManager.swift
   Main.storyboard
   For each of these files, change the file name extension to “txt”.

4. From wherever, copy the screen captures into the MyCode folder. Rename them to (TBA).

5. Select the top-level folders:
   (project)
   MyCode
   Right-click, and choose Compress 2 Items, which creates a zip file. The zip file may be sizeable, with all of the screen captures.

6. Login to Blackboard/My.Seneca, and in this course’s Assignments area, look for the upload link, and submit your work there.