BSP systems is a Hillsborough NJ based Construction Consulting firm. The firm was engaged by one of it's clients to develop a web based system to enable auditing of cell tower sites, based on a questionaire.

Impact Informatics was brought in to the project after the initial round of requirements analysis to deliver the system.

The initial design approach called for hard coding the questions onto HTML pages.

David Brown, Impact Informatics' principal consultant foresaw some problems with the approach. Unless the end client trained personnel in the requisite software development skills:

1. It would be impossible to change the questions
2. It would be impossible for the client to change the order of the questions
3. It would be impossible for the client to add new questions.

To compound the problems for the development effort, the end client had imposed a very tight time frame for delivery of version 1 of the system.

To solve all of these problems, the concept of an Audit Page was "pushed back" onto the database, along with the notion of a Display Row, and the Questions themselves. A Valid Responses table is also included for those questions which required a single answer from a limited number of options.

Each Audit Page can have multiple Display Rows, which in turn can have multiple Questions. Since Audit Pages, Display Row, and Questions all have a column for sort order, the end client gains the ability to reconfigure the audits by changing the values for the column in the database. Similarly, new questions can be added through the expedient of adding rows to the DisplayRows, Questions and if neccesary, the Valid Responses tables.

The Questions table is modeled so as to include columns to ascertain whether or not responses to a given question passed basic validation checks, such as Data Type, Length and Scale, as well as more complex tests such as regular expressions. The information is dynamically generated into a javascript resource function designed to work with a generic javascript validation routine. This approach saved an enormous amount of time as opposed to the more standard one of writing a client side validation routine for each page.

As a result of Impact Informatics innovative problem solving, version one of the system was delivered on schedule, with only 2 cosmetic problems. The end client got a system vastly more flexible and powerful then originally envisioned.