CampAdmin – must try harder….

Having been taken to camp as the ‘techie dude’, and lumbered with the responsibility of running the shop and bank, I decided it was time to brush the dust of the CampAdmin tool that I wrote 2 years ago for camp at Alltnacriche. Back in January/February I had lofty ideas about rebuilding the interface, and fixing all the problems. In reality, I did none of it, which means that there are still some issues with it, namely:

• Probably the biggest, and likely unsolvable, problem is the need to scan the entire stock of the shop at some point before the tuck shop opens. I reckon it took me about 3-4 hours this time. I’m not sure there’s an easy way around this, unless I can persuade SU to give me a database dump of their stock system beforehand, which is unlikely
• The other major, non-software, problem was the insistence of the onsite staff that all items must be scanned on their system as well as ours. This took ages, and seemed relatively pointless, IMHO. Next year I may see if they will let me manually enter the details from a post-shop report, which would be easy enough to generate, which would simply list the product codes and the quantity sold.
• The reports are crap. Really, they are. Not only are the reports I have created often a bit useless, but there are a number that are obvious by their absence. And the wxPython reporting engine is, to say the least, a bit crap. There are 2 solutions – see if they’ve upgraded the engine, and build a new reporting suite onto the existing tool, or use an already existing reporting tool to pull data off the MySQL backend. It would be interesting to see how quickly I could pull something together using OpenOffice.org’s new Base program.
• The current set up allows no way to add a camper with a given ID – the ID is generated by the tool. This is a problem if you given someone a big sheet of barcodes to assign to people rather than doing it in advance. In the end I entered them all in by hand through MySQL.
• The photos never happened _again_ – this functionality either needs removed completely, or I need to work out a good way of getting all the photos on the system quickly and easily.
• There _still_ is no way to create negative value items – while this sounds pointless, when it comes to things like refunds, or reinstating balances after a tuckshop ban, it would be really helpful.
• For some reason you still need to click on the first cell in the Shop system before you can start scanning. It should really be more seamless than this – mouse interaction should be a bare minimum.
• A dedicated tuckshop ban system might be a nice addition
• A way of calculating the cash in hand seperate from the main system might be a really good idea, even if it is tied to the existing system.

There were, however, some good things

• It works! I’m actually quite proud of the system, and it got one or two envious looks from people
• The barcode scanner still works really well, and using the Shop system was actually really easy
• Xubuntu was an excellent platform to run it on – nice and slender on the dedicated PIII 500/128MB RAM I had it on. I was very impressed with what the Xubuntu guys have done.
• I managed to fix a couple of small problems with the system while I was there – it was nice to know that a) my Python isn’t too rusty, and b) my ‘proper’ job has helped improve my SQL skills.

So – plans for the future? (Whether or not this actually happens is up for debate):

• I’d like to rebuild the interface with Gtk, using Glade. I think I can do this really quickly, and prettier too
• I’d really like to get hold of a touch screen, and replace any mouse input with touch screen, and include some of the touch screen Point of Sale goodness that we see in shops these days
• I’d like to network 2 machines, and run 2 tills over a network, with perhaps the database running on a dedicated backend/reporting server
• I definitely need to fix all the problems, especially the reporting issues.
• Ultimately, some seperate, reporting/management system, that provides a simple interface for managing all the camp finances would be outstanding.

Of course – if somebody would like to pay me to do the work, I wouldn’t say no

Although it’s not been distributed, this is totally GPL code, so if anyone wants it, just let me know.

mrBen