Automating a paper form process

Though we do a pretty good job of keeping our technology recently up to date, we do still have some processes that are unnecessarily done on paper. For this project, the requirements were relatively simple: I was given a copy of the paper form, and asked to create a web page to replace it. This page needed to be able to upload pictures, and send a copy of all data via email, as well as be pulled back to a corporate level database. They also requested that certain fields (like the name and location of a store) be populated automatically. Finally, it needed to have a mobile version that was better suited for mobile screens.

For the the main challenges here were inexperience: I had worked with HTML/CSS/JS and even some PHP, but never ASP.Net. I also had never worked with Informatica (to sync data between public databases), or the Microsoft Azure platform.

Azure itself presented another challenge: C# native libraries for sending email aren’t supported on Azure. To accomplish this, I ended up having to implement SendGrid to send emails.

To this end I created a public database (Azure SQL Server) to store data received and settings for the app (things like emails to send to/from, and whether or not to autopopulate data), a corporate database to house the data (SQL Server 2012 I believe), a pair of ASP.Net websites (one desktop oriented, one mobile oriented) and the stylesheets to go with them, and a set of Informatica workflows to pull data to the public database (for item and unit information), and from the public database to a corporate database (to house the data that is submitted), as well as purge the data being pulled (to avoid paying more for Azure than necessary).