dfd for shopping cart application

Hi,

First of sorry as due to lack of time I'm not continuing EE regularly. For better understanding you should provide a bit details of your project flows. Anyways, you can make both customer & admin in the same flow. Actually most of the admin works should be done automatically & finally reports in numbers of way can be retrived from the main database. Still EE doesn't support images of I'll have to provide a sample flow in raw text. See below, a DFD for a small range shopping cart should be like this.


        Designing the Main Page
           (Loging Via Cust ID)
                        |
        Product Search/ Listing
                        |
    Selecting a Perticular Product
                        |
      Selection through CheckBox   ---------> Temp order record record *
                        |
          Billing/ Shipping Info        ----------> Recording Customer's Data
                        |
 Shipping + Product Price Calculated  ----> If shipped via 3rd party then charge is
                        |                                     calculated from their linked server
 Order Confirmation & Accept Order  ----> Entry into main database including temp
                        |                                    records. *  Delete temp record
CCard/ PayPal/ Offline Pay Process    
       |               |                  |
 -----------    -----------     ----------
 ViaEmail      ViaEmail      ViaEmail
 -----------    -----------     ----------
      |                |                 |
Invoice to       Seller         Charge
Customer      Invoice        Amount
                ( in case of
                3rd party
                seller as Ebay)


>> "what else do i need 2 do in this analysis phase besides er diagrams and dfd?"

-- in short I must say there are lots of things you need to do besides these twos. If I discuss those here, this thread will be 30-40 pages long. Anyways, here I'm discussing some matters in brief.

[1] Layers: As it's an E-Com site, there must lots of validations. So, in which layer r u doing these? In Business Layer or in GUI Layer? Which will be is correct & deals faster? See: http:Q_21817483.html

[2] Majore System Designing Activities are as follows
     
     *  System & program test preparation
     *  System Interface Specification
     *  Audit Consideration
     *  Audit control & Documentation control

[3] Input & Output Analysis

    Objectives of Input Design are
     
      * Controlling amount of I/P
      * Avoiding delay
      * Avoiding errors in data
      * Avoiding extra steps
      * Keeping the process simple

    Major concerns about the input

      * What input is needed?
      * How & where is i/p is created?
      * How should source documents designed?
      * What format should be used for Input?
      * What medium should be used to store data ?

You need to have to the point answer of the above questions.

[4] Process Design of the Project

Process design includes how the system will interact with session, data & database. How the database connection will be established, how to generate a perticular record over an ID (may be via cookie)?

[5] Security Implementation

This is the most important part of ur project, what u can understand well. So be sure about pitfalls.

[6] Manual Interaction-Implementation

As this is an ECom site over which funds & products transferred, there should be some manual implementations as follows

   * Delay in Product Shipping
   * Customer Trouble Ticket
   * Payment Confirmation

[7] Robot Proof

This is a very vital part & must be implemented while a new user registration takes place. There a lots of malicious scripts out there in WWW to kill your site. Some robot programs are there that can make 100s of bulk registration in seconds. So, keeping this fact in mind do some PNG images will be generated automatically from database, which is not readable by any robot. You can see this WORD VERIFICATION while registering for a new Email address in sites like Yahoo, Rediff etc.

About Decision Tree pls see WIKI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree
It depens upon you that whether you will add a decision tree or not. Anyways, may be no from my side & if it was a software then I may say yes.

Oh! now I'm really tired. There may be more points, try to cultivate within &
consider above points in the Analysis & Designing Phase.

Thanks
Milan