Hostel App with Flutter Firebase
Maintaining a proper hostel service in universities with about thousands of rooms becomes very difficult with mere paper works and registers.
The current problem faced in hostel maintenance:
Every service provider needs to regularly check the details for any service request being made. The hostelers too need to enter manually their details and room number and the free timings in the register which is usually at the entrance of the hostel, imagine a hostel with 12 floors and the student has to come all the way down for requesting room service. This becomes heavy paperwork too and is bound to mistakes.
Managing the service and checking if the rooms are being provided with the required service or they were not attended to, also maintaining a track of complaints is also cumbersome, difficult with the conventional methodology.
Current Solution:
At present most of the hostels work on room service requests by conventional methods like maintaining a notebook where entries are to be made by the students requesting room service and similarly the service providers need to provide their acknowledgments in the register stating the accomplishment or closing of the service ticket raised.
“Every problem has a solution, although it might not be the Outcome that was originally Hoped for or expected”
My Solutions:
To solve this manual labor of jotting down things in a register and to maintain a constant track of the details and requests. I have developed an android application for the Room Service provision, that tackles all the problems mentioned in the above problem statement, which are:
· Digital platform to maintain records of service requests raised
· Mobile app allows the hostellers to stay in their room and raise a service ticket with the details of their room and free timings
· A Digital platform by which service providers view pending service tickets and get the job done, instead of checking register every time.
· Easy Management, after the service, is provided the students can close the service request ticket which means that the service is provided, if not the management can take the required steps in order to tend to it.
Tech Stack Used:
Flutter: Flutter is an open-source mobile SDK developer can use to build native-looking Android and iOS applications from the same code base.
Why Flutter? It saves you time and money, excellent performance, quick development thanks to hot reload, compatibility.
Firebase: Firebase is Google’s mobile application development platform that helps you build, improve, and grow your app. We can structure our data easily with collections and documents. Build hierarchies to store related data and easily retrieve the data we need using expressive queries.
3 Tier architecture
A 3-tier architecture is a software architecture that is composed of three “tiers” or “layers” of logical computing. They are often used in applications as a specific type of client-server system. Benefits of using a 3-layer architecture including speed of development, scalability, performance, and availability.
Entity Relational Model and Relational schema:
ER MODEL is a high-level conceptual data model diagram that helps you to analyze data requirements systematically.
Features and functionality of app:
We have two categories of users
- Hostellers or service requesters: The student in the hostels raises the ticket requesting room service. The students from one entity with the following attribute: Name, Room number. We also want the student to specify the feasible time for service, hence we have another attribute ‘Time’.
- Housekeeping members or service providers: The service providers need to check the tickets raised and provide the service. They basically have only viewing options. As the service confirmation should be within the hands of the students in order to give ratings
My Application
Login/Register: The user while opening the app for the first time gets an option to log in or register with an animation bottom app bar.
View Page: After successfully logging in the user will be able to view all the unattended room service tickets raised by the students along with the required details like the Name of the ticket raiser, their registration number, room number to which the service is required, and the status of the ticket which tells the feasible timings or if the ticket is closed.
A bottom floating button i.e. Settings provides various options for the user to edit the details such as Profile update, Time for service update and also to close the service ticket.
Settings:
- Profile update: The update profile tab allows user to make edits to their room number, and other personal details
- Schedule service ticket: Students get to choose their free timings when the room will be open for the service providers to do their job.
- Close service ticket: The user can select the close ticket option in the settings and a pop-menu appears asking for confirmation to close the ticket.
Conclusion:
This Room service app provides an easy way for the students and the management to solve the conventional problem of organizing and maintain a record of service requests in a paper book format to a digital platform with easy and fast response, cloud data storage.
