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Description
Because of the varied background required for successful completion of an undergraduate degree at San Diego State University, graduating students sometimes end up working jobs that emphasize only one of their many skills. For example, for the flameretardant division of Borax it is often necessary to formulate and test data for the many industrial plastic products that contain a product called Firebrake ® ZB. Each use of Firebrake ® ZB requires knowledge of how much of the product to include, as well as test results which are important in determining the effectiveness ofFirebrake ® ZB. A salesperson working for Borax would need examples of how well Firebrake ® ZB benefits a particular product as well as how much of it might be needed for a given project. Hence, it is important to have an easily manageable system for accessing such data. Before this project began information about the uses of Fire brake® ZB were held in an unorganized notebook containing nearly 200 pages. I therefore proposed to organize this information and to construct a program in Visual Basic 6.0 for easy and efficient access of the needed material. The first step in the development of the program was to organize data sheets of Firebrake ® ZB into a database consisting of different characteristics tied to an identification number. These characteristics consisted of the types of plastics that are needed, whether the product contains halogens, and the identification number of a certain data sheet. The task of accessing the database, and searching specific criteria is achieved by a series of structured queries (SQL). An example of a SQL might be "SELECT [polymer] FROM [database}] WHERE [halogenated]= 'yes'". In the final VB 6 program this statement would access all the entries which had "yes" in the halogen field, and then would select only the information in the field labeled "polymer." Once the correct data sheet is found and selected by the user, the program opens the file corresponding to a field in the grid (in this case the identificationnumber,) and displays it in a rich text box. Since each data sheet consists of one page, the user can view the entire data sheet on the screen. In order to manipulate the file, the computer takes the data stored in the text box, and either sends it to the printer, or allows the user to save it in a separate file. The resulting program will be delivered to Borax where it will be used by their sales teams.
