Project Overview
Quote Letter Generator is a solution used by Rampini Construction Company in Switzerland to generate request quote letters and send them to its suppliers. Rampini wants to be able to track the history of the generated letters and the method used to send these letters.
Ease of use and interactivity are the main two success factors for the project so we developed the process workflow to start by searching the suppliers’ database for the prospected suppliers and add them to contact list, there are a number of features that the user can use through searching for the prospected suppliers to verify the selection like view supplier details, view suppliers contacts and edit supplier/contact information if the user has sufficient right to do so. After adding the required suppliers to the target list, the user should be able to select from a range of request a quote letter template and modify the selected one if needed as well as being able to fill in the required information for this specific letter. Finally the user should be able to generate the letter in PDF format or send it via email to suppliers.
Challenges
- The application searching features have to be highly responsive without negatively impacting the overall application performance. InspirationGate decided to utilize Telerik ASP.NET Ajax UI Controls to increase the interactivity of the web application and to reduce the time and budget needed to develop the presentation layer. The database response time was also a key factor in increasing the overall response time of the application, InspirationGate spent
considerable time optimizing all the data queries to provide the required data in the best possible response time to be used by the application.
- The frequently changing requirements from the customer introduced not only technical challenges on the development team but also introduced management challenge in the project management and engagement with the customer, InspirationGate decided to use an agile project management technique and splitting the application features to smaller features to make it easy on the development team to develop and test them in shorter period and on the project management and customer to budget, sponsor and track.
Provided Solution
InspirationGate decided to develop a workflow based application, through this workflow the user should be able to select the target suppliers, select and review the appropriate quote letter template and finally generate the quote letter and send it by email.
The workflow above along with other administration and management features were developed in two tiers application as shown below.
Presentation layer
InspirationGate development team decided to use Telerik ASP.NET Ajax UI Controls to develop most of the presentation layers components, the reason behind this decision is the extensibility and customization capabilities provided by Telerik. The completed solution heavily depends on Ajax and client side components to provide the interactivity required by the business.
Business Logic Layer
From backend perspective the application is considered a data management intensive application, so our development team had to pay a great attention to the performance of every single query we write as well as the type of transaction we use and data isolation we consider in each scenario. The application has also a number of components used to implement a set of business needs like creating and managing marketing campaigns, editing request a quote letter template, generate quote letter instances and finally track the history of the generated quote letters.
Technologies
Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server 2008, Telerik ASP.NET Ajax Suite Q2 2009.