First-Year Programming Project for IT

Welcome to the Student Management System (SMS)!

This is a simple, easy-to-use management system that is mainly housed on MySQL to fetch and send data. You can think of it as some sort of "simulator" for a traditional LMS, just simpler! Some of the features include:

• A Login and Register System
• Adding and Removing Students
• Viewing Student Information
• Viewing Account Information

Please ensure to read Getting Started, as it's extremely important to use specific parameters and libraries to run the program.

Built With

This is a list of libraries and modules that were used throughout this project:

• MySQL, for database features;
• PTable, for formatting tables;
• Datetime & Time, for time-related outputs (or to delay some functions);
• Threading, for some things to load simultaneously

How does it Work?

It's a console-based program, so no TKinter or GUI-based programs were involved in the making, except for some formatting libraries like PTable.

NOTE: For simplicity, security, and less error-prone events, this program will be **locally run**, meaning the SQL database will
not query to a dedicated machine to connect to and send data.

The database will be run on the user's machine instead (see Getting Started - MySQL Connections).

Moving on, you need to register an account. This is really just a school project, you can enter anything you want as a field and it will accept it! You can choose between three different types of users:

• Student, which can view and manage account information and look at classrooms they are in.
• Teacher, which can view and manage student within the classroom, as well as their own information.
• Administrator, highest level of permissions, can do anything from managing all classrooms to removing teachers/students.

Observe that for administrators, they were manually added. That's why I have inserted a test account in sqldb.py under the following credentials if you want one to play around with:

admin_vals = (
    AdministratorID="727",
    FirstName="root", 
    LastName="user",
    UserName="rootadministrator",
    EmailAddress="root@yourlocalstore.com",
    Password="!_INFR2025_$$$$$$"
)

Once you make your "account" and log in, you will be given sets of options depending on what you choose.

Getting Started (Libraries and Modules)

If you haven't already, you will need to clone this project. In your VSCode Terminal, enter:

git clone https://github.com/YourLocalStore/SMS_Beta.git

Alternatively, you can simply download the ZIP file of this project, and move the unzipped folder into VSCode.

Then, you must install the following packages/libraries by doing the following:

pip install mysql-connector-python
pip install python-dotenv
pip install ptable
pip install passlib
pip install configparser

Getting Started (MySQL Connection)

You will need to download the SQL Installer, specifically the 352MB version in 32-bit. You may watch a quick installation guide here, otherwise here are the steps:

1. In the installer, you can choose between what features you can install. Just ensure that the installation includes both the MySQL Server and MySQL Workbench, if you are unsure, just select a full installation.
2. Keep everything default, besides the password you make (making a user is not needed and will default to a root user). Ensure to keep this password, as it is important for the database connection.

After installing, locate the "+" icon next to "MySQL Connections" in the MySQL Workbench, then ensure the following settings in Parameters:

Connection Name - {Enter any name}
Connection Method - Standard (TCP/IP)
Hostname - 127.0.0.1
Port - 3306
Username - root

After that, click "OK", then enter the SQL connection you just made using the password from installation. Make sure that the MySQL Windows service is running (Task Manager -> Services -> Search "SQL").

For the final step, there is a config file in the codebase named Credential-Configuration.ini.

1. In Credential-Configuration.ini, you will need to change the fields according to your database configuration.

This is what the Credential-Configuration.ini file should look like:

[Credentials]
host =
port = 
user =
password = 

2. Once that is done, Save the Credential-Configuration.ini file, then run main.py.

The .ini file will grab these credentials and use them in the SQL connector like so:

self.sql_serv = mysql.connector.connect(
    charset = "utf8",
    use_unicode = True,
    host = self.config["Credentials"]["Host"],
    port = self.config["Credentials"]["Port"],
    user = self.config["Credentials"]["User"],
    password = self.config["Credentials"]["Password"],
    connection_timeout = 300
)

So there is no need to change any values in sqldb.py.