E-R diagram help

[Vektor]

Your help would be greatly appreciated developing a school project on an online application processing system whereby a student will make their applications online for addmission. I have identified entities so far which are Applicant, Course, Modules, and Department Registrar. Please help on as how i can construct an entity relationship diagram.

[SykomantiS]

Well since it's a school project, I guess you'll need to put some effort in first, as we won't be doing it for you Show us your idea of your e-r diagram and we'll take it from there.

[Ron2K]

You're going to have to provide us with more information with regard to business rules and so forth.

Also, are you required to do any normalisation?

[Vektor]

This is basically the E-R diagram that i have constructed for creating my system. This system(prototype) will be intended for applicants who wish to apply at a particular college. First they will have to create an account which will enable them to fill in their personal details and submit academic results of their previous school qualifications. From there the registar will view all the applications and process them giving the students whether their applicatin was succesful or not... Help would be really be appreciated if i am on the right track from the E-R diagram i have constructed.

[Ron2K]

You're on the right track.

One correction that I would make: in my experience with tertiary institutions, a given module can be part of many different courses (this is particularly true with first-year modules); that creates a many-to-many relationship between courses and modules. When you normalize your DB schema, you will resolve that many-to-many relationship into two one-to-many relationships with an intersection entity linking the two. (If you haven't heard of normalization yet, I suggest Googling, because you will encounter it at some point in DB design.)

[Zana]

I done this before, and in all my levels... glad its over and i dunnit..
First of all looka nd study the textbook, rather refer to your textbook first and learn from it and then acquire extra content based on it, as some methods differ slightly from others when drawing these.
Basically the squares are a graphic representation of your tables.
What you do is you draw lines connecting them ( one to many, many to many and many to one) (some may differ some uses diamands, others uses dashes& triangles) Rather draw to the style according to your book.
The atributes are the headings for the tabels.
If you do your ERD it should look similar to the linking of tables and content in a MS Access database , as you can also link and join things... but the ERDs are there to prepare and plan before you put them in ACCess.,
But first like others say you normalize, but if you find Normalize difficult, and like to see things graphically draw ERDs, and and then look at them and nromalize on how you get it more correct and clean, and readraw a normalized ERD based on your rough ERD.
There are many was to get round this..
Methods are taks in what what users/programs do with the data(attributes).
Yopu will aslo notice a strange shape/resemblence if you should design a class(or data flow diagram) diagram for the program using the data.

also think of the term of Logic:
"what would Spoc do?"
if you a feminist like me
"what would T'Pol do?"
Is the key way in how to think about Data on where it goes flows etc..
Love and hugs
Danielle
((^_^))