README

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|*** UIC Desktop App ***|
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Team Peter:         
    >Peter Hanula (Graphics, front end design)
    >Peter Bekos (Data gathering, back end design)
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>>>Project Goals:
The goal of this project is to bring all sorts of UIC related information
to students with out the need to go on a mad scavenger hunt
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>>>Design in Mind:
Front End:
We are going to go with a "tab and section" styled layout
-Homepage, a place to start
-Maps, any type of map graphic one would need around UIC 
including CTA and food
-Directory, listing of staff contact info
-Courses, listing of course selection
-Events/News, news feed
-Athletics, scores and updates on sport teams
-Library, information on library and contents
-Book Store, book pricing and look up
-Housing, useful housing information including laundry view
-Safety, numbers to call

Back End:
-Restaurant Database, a text file storing all restaurant information 
for a location
-Menu Database, text files per restaurant that contain menu, food and price
-Course Database, html files re made containing course data
-HTML Parser, finds the information we want from a website,
very custom build and not too flexible, but it works well
-Menu Loader, loads in and allows manipulation of menu info
-Location Loader, loads in and allows manipulation of restaurant info
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>>>Implementation of Ideas:
Front End:
It started with design mode in qt and dragging widgets onto our main 
window. We wanted a simple guy that was organized but also very stylish. 
This is where style sheets came in. once we knew more or less the layout
 of our application, we added some widgets and edited the style sheets. 
 then we were able to create a simple slide out menu that was efficient 
 and spared us space. Some styling also included the addition of subclasses 
 to make a group of widgets do specific things ( for example enter and leave
 events for the side menu buttons ). we were able to group the side menu 
 buttons together and only they would react to the subclass. 

Back End:
Goal 1: Efficient way to get the data we need
Goal 2: Tools to "play with" data we have
-Since there wasn't a solid structure defining all restaurants in a local
area, I had to scout them out my self and decide how far we were going to
go. Then from that I went on google and hand picked the restaurants to
include. From there I had found a website that had a nice layout where
I would grab all the menu pages as HTML and then extract the name and
price of each dish and store them in text files.
-Part two of my project was finding a way to put this data to use. I 
started off creating a function to read in the information in my text file
and then proceeded to make functions that can interpret the data, for instance
like a search function.
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>>>Project File Structure:
//340Final (Peter H, front end)
//UICmod (Peter B, back end)
	-structure.txt, file listing how I'm going to make the infomation work
	-main.cpp, main for my tool programs
	//courseCat
		-contains all the modified course html files
	//HTML
		-contains all restaurant menu html files
	//images
		-contains a few graphics from project run
	//Locations
		-list of restaurants
		//Menus
			-menu files
	//include
		-header files
	//src
		-c++ class files
	//REMADE FOR QT
		-modified classes that worked with Qt, considering we had problems
		connecting the back and front end