This project involved a minimal amount of design, but required a lot of database work. Billy Finley created the plan for about 12-15 online surveys for The Foraker Group, the largest non-profit in Alaska. He brought me in to help implement his idea and it was a great chance for me to put into practice Adobe’s Cold Fusion, a direct competitor of my native server-side language, php. The big achievement with this project was how we made a huge amount of data so flexible, so accessible, and so drop-dead simple for the admin user.
The sign-in and registration system is very robust; it includes all the features that users have come to expect from modern web applications (automatically generated emails for password maintenance, etc). Below, you see where the user registers. Foraker Group is collecting lots of important data from the very beginning of the application.
The application collects all the necessary contact information in the very beginning.
This is only a small fraction of the data collected. After registering, the user fills out about a dozen different forms relating to salary and benefits at his or her organization. All of this data would be a useless burden if there were not a good way to manage it, and that’s what the bulk of our work was.
The admin user can view, sort, edit, and even export the data as an Excel spreadsheet.
In the view shown below, the admin user has the ability to add, edit, and delete entries in a list of common duty positions at non-profit organizations. Survey participants can then describe the compensation and demographics for whichever positions apply to them. On the back-end, the admin user can make this data do all sorts of tricks.
The admin user establishes a variety of position descriptions for survey participants to fulfill.
The homepage for the admin user is an HTML table highlighting the completion status of all the different organizations. The admin user can edit, delete, or add entries. This is where the admin user designates various survey participants as being complete–she can also send them an automatically generated email to prod them along a bit.
The homepage for the administrative portion. Admin users can sign in and perfrom dozens of different tasks with the data.
Client-side validation means the user gets instant feedback.
Another interesting feature of this application is our use of Adobe’s Spry Framework for Ajax to provide client-side validation for the forms. This means that if the user enters invalid data, such as deleting all data from a required field, an error message appears as soon as the data is altered. And, just as important, when the user enters valid data, the form input turns a pleasant shade of green. This stands in contrasts with the traditional model, where the user clicks “submit”, waits for a new page load, and then has to search for the nagging error messages.
This was a fun project because we put a lot of work into making the code really user friendly, but then all we had to do was hand it over and watch as users populated it with data. It’s been satisfying to watch as the application has held up well under a growing accumulation of data.
Wow that’s really nice stuff, just awesome stuff.