Data Storage Details

Description of Data Storage

All the data of this hospital-management-system is stored in CSV (Comma-Seperated-Value) files, because of two major reasons:

these plain-text files can be easily converted to spreadsheets, thus making it human-readable, plus;
CSV files are easy to parse, making data extraction easier.

S.No.	Header(s)	Description
1.	id	ID : string (composed of positive integers);
2.	firstName	First Name of a person : string;
3.	lastName	Last Name of a person : string (might be blank);
4.	gender	Gender of a person : string (composed of a char, either 'M' or 'F');
5.	age	Age of a person : string (composed of positive integers);
6.	mobNumber	Mobile Number of a person : string;
7.	address	Address of a place : string; Formation of the address string : values of the different fields of the class `address` i.e. `line1, line2, city, state, pinCode, country` are pushed into the address string seperated by a backtick character, since commas (`,`) are already used by csv files for differentiating adjacent cells of the same row; also, since values of the fields `line1` and `line2` might contain commas (`,`), so, before storing them, an iteration is performed over them and each `,` is replaced by `^`;