Practice WOD: Car Rental

In this WOD, you will read a textual description of a domain model and the ways the data needs to be manipulated, then generate an ER diagram representing this model.

Car rental domain model

A car rental company called RentAJunker keeps a number of offices in a variety of cities and locations within each city. Each location maintains a number of cars and trucks. The car types include: Economy, Standard, and Van. Truck types include Box Trucks and Cargo Vans.

RentAJunker maintains a list of all their customers. When a customer first rents a vehicle, the company records the customer name, address, and phone number. A customer is usually identified by their phone number.

A customer can reserve a vehicle for specific days, can rent a vehicle, or return the vehicle that she/he has rented. To make a reservation, a customer provides the location, the type of the vehicle and the day and time for which she/he would like to pick up and return the vehicle. When a customer returns a vehicle the clerk enters the date, the time, the odometer reading and whether the gas tank is full.

Instructions

Please construct an ER diagram using Lucid Charts of the Car Rental domain model.

  1. Start your timer.
  2. Call your chart ERD-CarRental.
  3. Use Lucid Charts and the appropriate crows foot notations.
  4. Specify the entity fields in your entity descriptions. Be careful to exclude Java fields that implement relationships.
  5. Make sure to follow the model design guidelines.
  6. When finished, download a PNG file containing your description.

When finished, stop your timer, and record how many minutes it took you to complete the WOD.

Rx: < 12 min Av: 12-16 min Sd: 16-20 min DNF: 20+ min

Demonstration

Once you’ve finished doing the WOD a single time, watch me do it:

Standard WOD Caveats

You’ll learn significantly less from watching me solve the WOD if you haven’t attempted the WOD yourself first.

While it’s an achievement to finish the WOD no matter how long it takes, you might experience “diminishing returns” if you work longer than the DNF time. Thus, it might be strategic to stop working at the DNF time and watch my solution.

After watching my solution, I recommend that you repeat the WOD if you have not achieved at least Av performance. If so, be sure to:

Feel free to keep trying until you make Rx if that’s of interest to you.