Flashcard App

Background and Inspiration

This is a simple flashcard desktop application based on a previous VB project that I made to help with studying for A-levels.

This application was designed to suit my own preferred study technique of writing long/detailed flashcards and then studying them by jotting down my answers (as opposed to the traditional "think of/say the answer to yourself" method).

After creating and using my initial VB application for a couple of years, I discovered the flashcard app/website Anki and I have taken some inspiration from Anki to design this version of my application. Specifically, my old application only organised cards by assigning each one into a set. However, Anki has the additionaly ability to assign multiple tags to each card for more complex filtering.

About

This is a Java Swing application which uses MySQL to store a database of flashcards. It allows the user to create, edit and study their own flashcards.

Edit

For organisation, each flashcard belongs to a set and can also have multiple tags.

Home

A user can filter their flashcard database by set, tag and keyword before studying them. The user can choose to study a group of flashcards in a random order or in order of their knowledge ratings.

Study

During study mode, the user can view the card's front content (i.e. questions/prompts) and has a space to type their thoughts/answers.

They can then click to reveal the card's back contents (i.e. answers/info).

After studying each card, the user can rate their knowledge of the card which will be stored for next time.

Implementation

Database

The database consists of 2 relations: Cards and CardTags.

Cards stores all the main properties of a flashcard (Title, Set, Front, Back...).

CREATE TABLE Cards (
	CardID int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
	Title varchar(255) DEFAULT 'Untitled',
	CardSet varchar(255) DEFAULT 'Set 1',
	Front varchar(3000) DEFAULT '',
	Back varchar(6000) DEFAULT '',
	Rating float(3) DEFAULT 0,
	PRIMARY KEY (CardID)
	
	);

CardTags is used to stores pairs of Cards and Tag names.

CREATE TABLE CardTags(
	CardID int,
	Tag varchar(255),
	PRIMARY KEY(CardID, Tag),
	FOREIGN KEY (CardID) REFERENCES Cards(CardID) ON DELETE CASCADE
);

When I first designed and created the database, I included a separate relation, Tags, which the CardTags relation referenced, rather than simply storing the TagName in CardTags. I did this with the idea of potentially atatching other attributes to a Tag in the future (such as a Tag Description or Tag Groups). However, I later decided that these ideas were unncessary and hence restructured the database to remove the redundant Tag relation.

Classes

• App
  • The root JFrame for the application
  • Uses CardLayout to display/switch between the HomePage, EditCardPage and LearnPage panels
• HomePage
  • JPanel that contains controls for filtering and viewing cards
  • Handles navigation to the Edit/Learn pages as well as deletion and insertion of cards
• EditCardPage
  • JPanel that contains controls for editing a card. Includes instances of:
    • EditCardContentPanel
      • JPanel with controls for editing the front and back of the card
    • EditCardPropertiesPanel
      • JPanel with controls for editing the general properties of a card and it's tags
• LearnPage
  • JPanel with controls for studying and rating cards. Includes an instance of:
    • LearnCardPanel
      • JPanel with controls for viewing and learning a single card
• Controller
  • Class that contains attributes and methods for managing the overall flow of data in the application
  • Maintains a list of the current Cards that are being viewed/learned/edited:
    • Card
      • Class that models a Flashcard, with attributes for each of it's properties
  • Accesses the database using:
    • DB
      • Class with methods for querying the database

Possible Future Changes

• Add ability to change filter mode from using AND to OR (at the moment the default is AND. i.e. all filters must apply for a card to be part of the results)
• Changes to knowledge rating:
  • Display the rating of each card on the home page
  • Add an additional filter for knowledge rating
  • Maybe colour code ratings/add a progress bar to allow more visualisation of the knowledge level/progress of a card
  • Add a progress bar/score to indicate the collective knowledge level of the currently displayed/filtered cards
  • Change the formula for ratings to consider the time since the card was last studied (rated)