It's alive- IT'S ALIVE!!

Okay, so the title of this post might be a bit of an overstatement. ChefHelper is not really alive, so much as starting to form up from the primordial ooze and take its first breath of very real air. After yesterday's full-on programming sessions and some work this evening, I have successfully created and tested all the methods needed to:

1. Retrieve all the recipe information in my database
2. Convert that data into recipes and all their parts, every load, from scratch to objects to listings
3. Easily access master lists of each component
4. Print a text version of the eggplant recipe (and any other recipe I add with few null values) 

I am very excited to have gotten to this point, but there's still a long way to go. It took a long time to properly figure out how to load everything and in which order (dependencies can throw you for quite a loop!).  Oh look at that, I was just reviewing my EER diagram (I found out that that stands for Extended Entity Relationship - who knew?) and forgot to add the Notes list to the recipe class. I'll get right on that...

Now that I've created this template for 11 classes, Notes were not a challenge. Okay, so there were a few hold-ups, but not bad overall.

I'm pretty much done for the evening - I'm out of time and need to de-stress a little before going to bed, but I'd like to lay out what's next in this process.

Like I said, I now have all the methods and members in place to store all the lists in the Java portion. This sets me up rather well for adding the methods that INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE from the database. I may have mentioned earlier that I've encapsulated this functionality in my Database class, so other classes just need to have ways to build SQL DML Strings to pass to this class. 

I'm planning on having each object know how to write itself to the database. Then the GUI only has to provide ways to select the object and tell it to do its job. The GUI will probably just create a blank member of each class to work with and then verify all requirements are met before being allowed to save it. I've got a bunch of ideas of how to accomplish this but we'll see what happens when I get that far. 

After completing and testing this functionality, I only have two major program pieces to build: the meal planning classes and objects (which should be easier now) and the GUI. Put it all together and I'll hopefully have everything running (cross your fingers, pray for me, wish upon eyelashes, stars, and satellites) by the end of the month. Which gives me one month to complete all the documentation and get it submitted with enough time for revisions, should any be required. The timeline is still very tight but I'm still very determined.