Our Clients

Case Study: NHS - Equipment Loan System (Elsie)

Assignment

JADe currently supports and maintains a legacy database system for tracking and managing the maintenance of all medical equipment in use within a Trust. It provides functionality for ad-hoc and planned maintenance schedules, suppliers, manufacturers, multiple customers and so on.

The technology behind this application is an IBM Informix 4GL application running against an IBM Informix SE database on SCO OpenServer Unix. The Trusts have requested a new piece of functionality to be integrated into their legacy system. This will enable them to track the actual location of their equipment through a library module over the intranet/extranet/internet.

Solution

A new piece of functionality is being developed using Windows .NET technology to integrate with the existing application. That is, the existing character based terminal emulated application will continue as is, while the new ASP.NET web application seamlessly links into the legacy application's database. Users will apparently interact with two 'separate' systems presenting quite distinct user interfaces, while behind the scenes the systems are integrated. The new software is an ASP.NET web application written in C# using Visual Studio.NET. It is architected into a number of well defined tiers, making use of the C# namespace feature to ensure component re-use.

The application uses the Microsoft ODBC data provider for .NET to connect to the IBM Informix SE database via the IBM Informix supplied ODBC driver. The new application has its own set of tables within the database. Synchronisation of these new tables with existing tables is implemented using database triggers and stored procedures.

The application will be deployed on a Windows 2000 web server machine running the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). This web server communicates with the SCO database server. The application writes events to the Windows event log. Configuration uses the standard .NET XML mechanism.

Result

The main benefits are:-

• Targeted specifically at UK NHS customers and therefore takes their special needs into account.
• Cost effective development; shared costs between a number of Trusts, based on a community development model.
• Integration to existing system, as opposed to complete re-evelopment, provides good return on investment (ROI).

Key Technologies

Informix SE DBMS, SCO Unix, .NET, C#, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, IIS Web Server