Car Travel Expenses

You are required to develop an application that aids employees in calculating their car travel expenses. An employee enters the rate per mile together with the destination and the mileage claimed for each journey that they have made during a period. The application will accumulate the total travel expenses for this period.

The tasks listed below are provided as a guide; by implementing each task in turn, you will develop a possible solution to the problem. You may care to add features of your own, but discuss them with your tutor before you attempt to implement them.

For each of elements 1, 2 and 3, you should submit:

• Header Sheet
• Screen shot of your application running, with brief annotation
• Neat printed program listing laid out in the prescribed manner.

Element 1

• 1 Produce an application that enables the user to enter a mileage, a destination and a rate per mile. On clicking a button the application should calculate and display the expense amount.
• 2 The calculation for the travel expense is to be changed. Only the first 100 miles of each journey are to be paid at the full rate. Any mileage in excess of 100 miles is paid at half the normal rate. Thus a journey of 60 miles at £0.40 per mile would amount to £24.00. A journey of 160 miles at a rate of £0.40 would amount to 100 * 0.40 + 60 * 0.40 * 0.50 giving £52.
• 3 Ensure that the application will not malfunction if the user should enter data in to output areas or enter invalid data.

Element 2

• 4 The application is required to accumulate the user’s total expenses for any number of journeys; it should calculate the total expenses at the higher rate, lower rate and overall total.
• 5 When the total expenses for this period have been calculated, the application will need to be set ready for the next period.
• 6 Data for a journey might be entered in error and noticed immediately, amend your application so that the current journey can be cancelled and not added to the totals.

Element 3

• 7 Add a feature to your application that will display details of all the journeys made by the current user during this period. The user should be able to scroll up to display previous journeys and scroll back to the latest journey.
• 8 It may happen that sometime after a journey has been registered it must be cancelled (perhaps the user was not entitled to expenses for this journey or they simply entered an incorrect value). The application needs to have some way to reduce the total expenses to be claimed. You will need to think carefully about this because all totals will have to be amended.

Element 4

This element of the assignment will add more features to the application using further Object Oriented Programming techniques. Your application will be documented so that other programmers can understand how your application has been designed and implemented; this will test your ability to communicate clearly and concisely. After reading your documentation an experienced programmer should have no difficulty in amending or updating your application.

You should submit a Program Documentation which should include:

• Header Page
• Contents List
• Brief User Guide that explains how to use your application.
• Screen image of each form you have designed
• A printed source code listing for each form
• A description of major data structures used in your application
• An explanation of each major procedure

If all elements have been attempted and your program is presented in this prescribed manner then it is not necessary to provide elements 1, 2 and 3 as separate documents

• Add a feature which will enable the user to select a destination from a list displayed on the screen. When the user selects a destination, the mileage should automatically appear. This feature will require some method which enables the user to add a destination (and its mileage) to the list.
• 10 Add a feature which will enable the user to amend and delete details of the destinations in the list.
• 11 Add features which will enable the user to save the destinations and corresponding mileages to a file so that they can be loaded back into the application on a later occasion.
• 12 Some features in your application are not required to be immediately accessible at all times (for example adding, amending or deleting a destination). Redesign your application to make appropriate use of multiple forms and a menu.