Aims and Background
This project aims to give students hands-on experience in designing and implementing a Web application on their own.
In recent years, scientists have increasingly turned to the web for keeping up-to-date with the recent publications in their respective fields of research. Citation databases such as Citeseer and Pubmed, and search engines such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search have made this job easier by providing a one-stop shop where publications can be searched using author, year or title information. The task in this assignment is to design a web application that enables a scientist to search for and select publications through a XML-based publication database using XML, Servlets and JSP.
Requirements
In this assignment,you will implement an application for searching through the MEDLINE publication database. The data will be provided to you (see below). You must use this data and no other. You will associate data such as search preferences and a "Reading List" with a user using cookies and HTTP sessions. You should not use a login (user/password) for this purpose.
Home Page
The user starts at a home page with a search interface that features:
1. 4 Input Fields, one each for Author, Article Title, Journal Title and the Number of Results to be displayed in a page with the following conditions:
1. The number of results to be displayed field - When the user first visits the site, this field displays the default value (10). The user can change the value to any integer. On subsequent visits by the same user, the new value must be displayed.
2. Author field - The user provides a series of last names of authors of each publication, separated by commas. E.g.: "Smith, Jones" selects all publications that have at least 2 authors, one with the last name Smith AND another with last name Jones.
3. Article title - Series of words appearing in the titles of publications, separated by spaces. E.g.: "web application engineering" selects all publications that have all the words "web", "application" and "engineering" appearing in any order.
4. Journal title - Series of words appearing in the titles of journal, separated by spaces. Selection condition same as that for article title
5. When two or three fields are provided, then the search results MUST satisfy the condition for each field.
2. a submit button
3. And, a link to a Reading List page.
- After completing input, the user clicks the submit button to start the search process.
Search Results
1. The search functions forwards the users to the results page. At the top of the page is a link to the user's Reading List
2. If the search has turned up empty, the results page must display "Sorry, no matching articles found!"
3. The search process returns with a list of publications that match the criteria in the manner described abovethat. The publications are displayed in this format.
Line 1: Authors, ArticleTitle, Journal Title, Journal Volume(Journal Issue), Publication Month, Publication Year
Line 2: AbstractText
The number of publications displayed must be restricted to that set by the user on the home page.
4. The user then selects via a checkbox which of the publications he/she would like to follow-up. These publications are added via a submit button to the user's Reading List.
5. At the bottom of the page are two navigation links Previous and Next that allow the user to navigate the results 1 page at a time. Enure that the Previous and Next links are not shown on the first page and the last page of results respectively.