Project Overview
Sitenotes have been looking to build a platform targeted to home inspectors and domestic energy assessors who are responsible for building out reports of home inspections, a process that involves having an inspector visit a place, sketch it out, apply certain quality and safety rules using pre-built charts, answer various kinds of questions and related.
The client wanted to develop a platform that would allow for dynamically building the form templates that will be used in filling out the inspections along with the flexibility to more easily change and alter the templates as the standard rules change.
In addition, the client wanted to make full use of TabletPC inking capabilities to streamline the inspection and data entry process. Finally, they wanted a number of complementary features including the capability to brand the software for different users, licensing features and related.
Challenges
- Building a framework that allows the user to design form templates in real time along with specifying various business rules, data validation rules and related.
- Building a runtime engine that uses predesigned form templates to allow the user to interact and fill out inspections at runtime with ease.
Provided Solution
To cover the business needs, InspirationGate set out to build two applications, one for handling the design time portion of the cycle and one to handle the runtime portion.
The design time relied on the .NET designer architecture for Windows Forms which is the base framework used by Visual Studio to provide real time features for designing a form. This includes a WYSIWYG interface for laying out controls on the form by dragging and dropping and setting various properties. This framework has been extended to allow the user to construct user interface from a custom set of developed controls that interact with a base framework for handling all the business rules and data validation.
Complementing this, is a runtime engine that uses these form templates to allow the user to enter to fill out his inspection, save it, then export/print it or edit at a later point. The system also included a rating tool that allows the user to fill a flow chart like interface to cover various standard inspection rules.
In addition, the system integrated with TabletPC SDK to make use of various advanced inking and text recognition features. The system also relied on Agilix Infinotes to allow the user to the tablet pen to build various kinds of advanced sketches for the rooms.
The system also relied on Xheo Licensing (now called DeployLX Licensing) for providing the required licensing features which involved both time trial and license server activation techniques.
Finally, we have provided the customer with flash based interactivity training that allowed the user to learn how to use in the application in a catalyst controlled environment with step by step instructions.
Technologies
Visual Studio 2005, C#, TabletPC SDK, Agilix Infinotes, Xheo Licensing (now called DeployLX Licensing)
Customer Feadback
"InspirationGate have done an excellent job on my project. The results are simply outstanding.
I have been in software development all my life, and they have performed as good as any I have come across.
Their communications are excellent, English fluent and they are around most of the time.
They also provided a professional user manual and excellent flash based help demos which users love."
-Stephen Walton, Director
Sitenotes