Reference no: EM132314038

Database Programming

The Smartcard Financial Settlement System

Introduction

For the Assignment for Database Programming and Administration you are required to write a Financial Settlement System (FSS) for a Smartcard Transaction Centre.

The Deliverables for the Assignment are structured in a way to enable you to achieve a mark that is related to the amount of work that you will contribute and the level of knowledge that you have attained. The detailed marking structure can be found at the rear of the document.

Overview

For some time now there has been a trial deployment of a Smartcard System in various locations throughout the country. A number of different types of Smartcard terminals have been deployed at selected sites. The types of terminals include Parking Meters, Payphones, various Vending machines and ticketing machines at selected railway stations. A number of Smartcard enabled terminals have also been placed in selected retail outlets like Newsagents and University canteens enabling the holders of the Smart cards to pay for their purchases using these cards.

The term electronic cash is often used when talking about Smartcard transactions; however the electronic cash needs to be converted to real cash so that the merchants, accepting the cards as payment, can be reimbursed. During the trial phase, the merchants were reimbursed manually, once a week. The settlement amount calculations have been done by the staff in our IT department and the merchants were sent a cheque for the amount of the settlement. During the initial trial phase the merchants were not charged a fee on the Smartcard transactions.

The Smartcard System is moving into the next phase of deployment. The number of merchants will be increased and there is a requirement to automate the Settlement process. The payment to the Merchants will be done via a direct credit into their nominated bank accounts and is to be done daily.

Each month the merchants will be charged a fee for the use of the Smartcard. The fee to be charged will be a percentage of the total transactions for the month. The actual amount is yet to be negotiated and it will be uniform for every transaction.
The fee collection will be done via a direct debit from the merchant bank account. The merchant will also be sent a statement showing the money banked and the fees charged for the month. NOTE: that the Monthly Settlement is not part of the Assignment. It is here only to help in understanding the system.

Your task is to write the application for the Smartcard Financial Settlement System. You are required to only create the daily settlement system and associated report. The application is to run in the Oracle Database and is to be written using the PL*Sql language.

The components of the application are

• The Daily Settlement file and a corresponding report
• A report to show terminal usage
• System control using a RUN table
• An email to a nominated recipient with the Banking report file as an attachment

The details of the application follow.

Daily Settlement

Deskbank File
The FSS system will be required to run daily and at the conclusion of the run, will produce a banking file that will be known as a Deskbank file. The Deskbank file will be sent to the designated banking organization electronically, most likely using a secure FTP channel.
The Deskbank file, when run in the banking system will contain information necessary to credit the merchants bank account with the amount collected by the Smartcard transactions. The total of the deposits into the merchants accounts is to be offset by a debit from our working bank account. The total of the deposits and the debits is to reconcile to zero.
This file is intended to be read by the banks systems.
A sample Deskbank file and the file specification can be found in the Appendix
****See the Note on Minimum Settlement under System Constraints

Daily Settlement Report
In addition to the Deskbank file, your system is to produce a daily reconciliation report. The report will be used by the business unit and will show the banking details generated by the Daily Settlement. The report will be created automatically when the deskbank file is produced, however your system should be flexible enough to allow the manual creation for a given settlement date.
This file is intended to be read by humans. A sample report is attached in the Appendix.

Terminal Usage Report
We need to keep track of the busiest terminals and the amount of traffic they generate. A report is required for the business units.
Each time the report is run it should produce Terminal Usage data for the current month, up to and including the current date.
The report specifications is provided.

RUN Table
The FSS system will run each day and should settle all those transactions that have not yet been settled. You are asked to create and maintain a RUN table which should keep track of the run dates and the status of each run.

You must use the run table to ensure that only one instance of the program is to run at any time. If the program is already running it cannot run again. If the program is restarted while another session is running then a log message is to be written into the logging table and the second program instance should terminate gracefully.

In order to minimize the banking costs we want to run only one settlement process per day. Use the run table to ensure that only one settlement is run per day.
If the settlement was already run on any day then the program should log a message to the log table and terminate gracefully.

If the program fails during the run it should log the failure reason to the logging table, update the run table with a status of FAIL. Also the fail reason should be written to the Run table so that production support know what needs to be repaired. The run end column should be populated. In such a situation, where the settlement failed, your program can be rerun on the same day. The assumption is that production support will have fixed the problem with the data so they may wish to run the settlement again. You MUST BE VERY CAREFULL however, that your program does not duplicate the merchants settlements. This could send us bankrupt.

The production support personnel will use the run table to assist them in monitoring and maintaining the system in the event of failures. One record should be created in this table for each run of the program.

Also, you are asked to maintain a log of your program runs which will enable the production support team to monitor the progress of your run. The log table will contain a timestamp and a periodic entry to mark the progress of your system.

Note: The logging is to be done by using the COMMON.log procedure which will be made available to you. I will show you which table the COMMON.log procedure utilizes for logging, You are of course free and encouraged to develop your own logging process.

Email the Daily Settlement Report to a nominated person
This component is optional and only those students that wish to take on the challenge can attempt this.
The Daily Settlement Report once created can be emailed to a nominated recipient. I will provide you with the bulk of the code you need to generate the email. You will need to modify the code I give you to add the file as an attachment to the email. The code and the full details will be provided on UTS Online.

Paramatising your code
So that your system is easily maintained once in production and to reduce the possibility of changes to the code I would like you to create a parameter table. The purpose of the parameter table is to store all the constants that you may hardcode in the code. Example of constraints that you will paramatise are date formats, email addresses etc.
Having the ability to paramatise your code will greatly reduce the maintenance and greatly increase the flexibility of your code.
Your table will be named DBP_PARAMETER

I will supply the code to create the table. You are free to create any additional attributes in the table but you must have the columns that I provide as a minimum.

System Constraints
• The FSS system should settle the transactions only once. It is possible that a user could restart the program multiple times on a given day. You should ensure that the settlements are not duplicated. In the cases where the user tries to run the application more than once on a given day, the system should not allow. This is to be controlled by the run table. If the program fails on a day then a rerun is allowable but it is vital that
- Settlements are not duplicated.
- Each transaction is settled if the merchant total is greater than the minimum amount

• The Daily reports and the production of other reports should be re-runnable by the users at any time and for any given date.

• The existing FSS system is located on ORALAB in the DBP_ADMIN schema. Select privilege has been granted on all objects in the schema to enable you to view the existing data. Your FSS system, when completed will make up the Smartcard system. It will be standalone, but will also be integrated into the existing tables. You should not make any modifications to the existing structure because your changes might ‘break' other components of the system.

• The E-R Diagram and specifications for the existing database tables can be found on UTSOnline under the Assignment tab.

• The daily transaction downloads, from the terminals, will be available in the database environment and the transaction table will be constantly uploaded with new transactions as they are downloaded from the terminals. This will be done by an existing automated process.

• It is anticipated that the transaction tables will grow very quickly. We will adopt an archiving strategy to move the data from the production environment into an, as yet, undefined environment. You can not assume that the transaction data is always available for your use. Note: Archiving of the transaction data is not in the scope of this assignment

• The bank will charge us a fee for all banking transactions. For this reason we will not be settling trivial amounts each time the program runs. Total settlement amounts for a merchant that are less than the designated minimum amount will not be settled in the daily transactions until the total settlement amount, during the month, reaches the minimum settlement amount. At the end of the month, any transactions that have not been processed during the month are to be finalized, irrespective of the amount.

• The minimum settlement amount is configurable and is stored in the FSS_REFERENCE table under the identifier of Daily Minimum Settlement

• The reload of the Smartcard and the subsequent collection and banking of the reload money is not a component of this system.

• The Deskbank file name will take the following format [StudentNumber]_DS_DDMMYYYY.dat for the daily file and The report file name format is [StudentNumber]_DSREP_DDMMYYYY.rpt

Note that DDMMYYYY denote the day, month, year of the settlement date when the deskbank file is created.

When your system runs it will produce three files and an email. The files are
The deskbank banking file The Banking report file The Terminal Usage report

An email will be sent to a nominated recipient with the Settlement report as an attachment

Attachment:- Database Programming.rar