Mail Room Scheduler

• 

  our initial idea

• 

  an insomnia test

Our project helps decrease wait times for picking up packages. During the first few weeks of school, we waited a combined 10 hours in line for our packages in the mail room. To mitigate this problem, we used web development to create a tool for students and mail room staff.

Using our app, students can add information to give mailroom workers an estimate of how many packages to expect, and allow them to plan accordingly. Then, when the package arrives, a notification would be sent to the student to schedule an appointment to pick up their package.

To set up the database, we used strapi, a Node.js library, which we found challenging and unfamiliar as first-time back-end programmers. To achieve this, we learned javascript in order to implement the functions we envisioned. For now, we manually input all the users and packages, but as you’ll see later, this would usually be handled by our user input form. To test our code with our database, we used Insomnia, an API that connected to the strapi database on someone else’s laptop.

Some of the API calls that we created include:

/recipients/SMC#?id=# This call assigns a timeslot number to a user with that SMC number using the function “update”

/recipients/SMC This get call returns a user's info using function “findOne”

/timeslots This get call returns all available timeslots using function “numAvailable”

Unfortunately, we did not have the time to add in an interface for the mailroom workers, but that is definitely something we would look to add in a future version of this project. We would also like to add a reward system for people who consistently picked up their packages on time and filled out the form for every package - this might entail time slot priority or some other form of reward.

Built With

• html
• insomnia
• javascript
• node.js
• react
• strapi