Documentation and Workflow Reporting

Business Case

Prior to starting this project with SolveITLabs, company had an application that facilitated the online creation and management of various reports. Reports are very specific to the industry in which company is operating.

The application could be deployed on JBoss 3.2.3 application server and used MySQL database server. The application strength is its ability to track a large number of custom reports through a pre-defined workflow.

Solution

SolveITLabs completed several major tasks improving and enchancing existed application. Some of the development additions, modification and enhancements included:

• Adding configurable Workflow, Roles and Locations features
• The hard-coded workflow was substituted with configurable workflow via implementing XML documents and loader class for those files.
• The report workflow, roles and locations can be customized by creating XML files per customer’s specifics.
• Three different code branches were merged into one main ‘Company’ application.
• Security infrastructure implementation. The data transmission was unsecured. The SSL feature was added to the application and now uses RSA/AES algorithms with SSL/TLS communication.
• Added JBoss v. 4.x.x. support. Additional configuration files were added to the application so now it can be deployed on newer versions of the JBoss application server.
• Management reports creation and integration. Previous versions of the application lacked the ability to provide analytical information about reports. SolveITLabs development team added ‘Management reports’ feature. These reports are based on Crystal Reports technology and the application extended to include Crystal Reports libraries and Web interface to work with analytical information.
• DB mapping creation and integration. The information that is entered into reports had to be stored in the database tables with specific schema according to third-party DB standard. SolveITLabs implemented several mappings using existing Java code, added new classes and updated existing ones so all information could be mapped correctly.
• SolveITLabs created customer specific configuration, integrated different form templates into application. Customer specific configuration was created in CVS.

Project Benefits

Current version of the Company reporting system has the following advantages:

• Configurable report workflow, roles and locations
• One main ‘company’ application with customer specific directories
• SSL/TLS support with AES 128- or 256-bit encryptionv
• JBoss 4 support
• Management reports for overall report analysis
• Advanced DB mapping support
• Several customer configurations
• Minor fixes and library updates

Continuous application development brings additional advantages improving JBoss v.4.x.x support, DB mapping support. Customized customer configuration integration is the integral part of the current solution.

Tools and Technologies

The following technologies, applications development tools and frameworks were used during application development:

• EJB
• XML (JDOM libraries)
• Struts
• Velocity
• XDoclet
• Ant
• JBoss
• MySQL
• Crystal Reports XI Developer, Crystal Reports 4 Eclipse
• Eclipse (with JBoss IDE plugins)
• JUnit
• Jakarta Cactus
• Apache Commons libraries
• BFO PDF libraries
• AccuSoft libraries