Jess ChampionSoftware developer
- Year
- 2014
- Organisation
- Solnet - for MBIE
An interactive tool for businesses.
Roles
Technologies
The Employee cost calculator (ECC) was a project I worked on with a small team from Solnet for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. The calculator is a tool featured on the ministry's CMS based website, which facilitates business owners in more accurately estimating how much it will cost them to hire a new employee.
Architecture
The tool was require to be hosted in the ministry website, and the content needed to be editable via the CMS. But they also required it to be built in such a way that it could be converted into an hybrid mobile app with little modification.
To achieve this, the calculator was built as a standalone Angular JS application with HTML5 and SASS. To get the content from the CMS, a dummy html page was created in the CMS that had all the content in a uniform html structure. Our web-app load this HTML page and parse it, turning the HTML structure into JSON, which is stored in local storage.
While a little complicated, this approach, decoupled the web-app from the CMS while still allowing the content editors to maintain the content easily, via the interface they were already familiar with.
The user interface and cross-platform compatibility
The MBIE website has an auto-redirect to mobile version of the website, and as such the ECC had to provide a mobile view as well as a traditional view. After analysing the UI designs provided, we determined that given the differences in formatting it would be better to have separate ui views and work-flows. Fortunately angular route, supports multiple views nicely. So it was a simple matter of detecting whether the user was on mobile version of the site or the full version, then directing them to the correct view.
By utilising angular templating we were able to avoid a lot of replication of code by sharing re-used components between the views.
Email restore
In addition to the main web application, we also built a small Java email server. This server when sent a request by the mobile app, generates a shortened restore link using goo.gl. The restore link, is emailed to the user, and can be used to re-populate the form as it had been filled in previously. To do this we had to get all the user-entered data into a url-safe encoding the fit under the 2083 character url max length enforced by IE and Chrome. To achieve applied gzip compression to the URL parameter and then encoded it using base 64 encoding.
- Year
- 2014
- Organisation
- Solnet - for Fonterra
A digital employment platform for the dairy industry.
