Secure Distributed Systems Using .Net

Secure Distributed System to Support a Retail-chain Draft Specification As you all know, a retail-chain has stores distributed all over a region, a state, a country, or even around the world. While each store in the chain has certain independence, in general, the chains within a region or a country, are bound to some rules. A central office may fix the prices, the inventory may be monitored and new supplies ordered from a central place, and the sales may also be monitored by a central place. In fact, the retail-stores may be operating in a hierarchic fashion. For example, a local office may coordinate all stores of a chain in Hampton Roads. All local offices within Southeastern Virginia may have another central control say in Richmond. All in Virginia may have one central office. May be all Southern States have a central controller. This may go on. In essence, there is a hierarchical management structure. This hierarchy could also be used for better utilization of resources. For example, if there is a heavy demand for raincoats and umbrellas in Virginia where it has been raining, and there is no demand and plenty of inventories in Texas due to drought, then it is probably better to transfer these goods from Texas to Virginia rather than ordering additional supplies from the manufacturer. Such structure could also be used to make decisions such as the location of new stores. In this particular project, which should be completed in less than two months (June 15- August 5), you should design the interfaces used at all levels (by customers, office personnel, and system administrators) and implement the infrastructure needed to support this hierarchy. The details of individual interfaces are left to each team. This is a team project with each team having up to 3 members. Like any other secure distributed system, the main objectives of this system are: security, response time and availability. For security, we need authentication and authorization functions. You may use a database to store the valid user information. In terms of response time, when a user has a query, the user should be provided an answer as quickly as possible. If there is a choice of providing slow but accurate information versus providing fast but approximate answer, then the user should be given an option to choose. However, it is also possible to have a default choice. Your project must incorporate the following features of .Net Topic Concept Basic Concepts and Controls Regular Expressions Validation Controls XML control Data-Bound Controls: Repeaters, DataList, DataGrid Calendar Controls User and Custom Controls [login to view URL] (Data Access) DataReaders DataSets DataAdapters ASP.NET Security Windows Authentication Forms Authentication Passport Authentication? Web Services Use of Crystal Reports .NET Remoting What is being monitored by the system? The system basically keeps track of two types of information: merchandise and personnel. For each item carried by the retail-store, the system should keep track of the sale price, current stock, and sales for that day, last week, and last month. Obviously, each item will be identified by a unique identification and a description. In terms of personnel, the system keeps track of the employees at each of the locations including the administrative offices such as the zonal, regional, state, and national offices. For each employee, it will keep track of the employee ID, SSN, name, sex (male or female), job title, employment begin date, and current annual salary. The types of queries/updates you will be implementing to show the utility of the system are given below. Along with each query/update, the arguments to be provided to execute the query are also provided. (These are only examples for illustration. You may expand them or modify them.) U1. Change price: Item ID, Price, date effective (sale price being changed) U2. Add an item: Item ID, description, price. (A new item is to be added) U3. Add to Inventory: Item ID, quantity (I