Business need
Apart from the dispensing equipment Customer offers his clients accompanying software that is compatible with all the suggested automatic dispensers. For now, it has fulfilled operators and engineers needs for fifteen years. But as any software today it had to conform with ever-changing and fast developing technologies along with the new Windows versions upcomings. Therefore next edition of this product has been released. Yet it arose a new problem of data carrying over – clients had to upgrade the software without losing all the data including sales history and dispensing formulas. In order to meet this need of prime importance, it was decided to develop a tool that will save client’s data in prior to software upgrade and then carefully transfer it after installing the new version.
Solution
As the result of the effective collaborative work trouble proof desktop application has been developed for database migration and validation. Its simple and friendly interface made it easy to apply even for non-techy users.
Our customer is IDEX Scandinavian manufacturing company that produces paint dispensing and mixing equipment for the architectural coatings industry. Now it provides services to the broad spectrum of clients and its office’s network covers all the continents.
- To develop fail-safe migration tool that will guarantee data integrity.
- To avoid the external libraries or frameworks installation to ensure simplicity of tool performance.
- To design simple and localize interface understandable for most of the users.
What was achieved:
- by means of the offered last solution, it became possible for our Customer to modernize his approach without risks of massive data and credibility loss;
- with the help of the proposed approach Customer fulfilled distinct needs of the wide international clientage showing his reliance and concern which in its turn resulted in its loyalty growth.
Technologies
- C++
- WiX widgets
- Firebird Server
- FirebirdSQL
- Windows OS
Project Results
The final product of given project developed by Softarex Technologies, Inc. included two components: Converter and Clean-up tools. This approach made possible to cover both cases appeared among clients: some of them were aiming to upgrade their software along with the platform, and other were just willing to continue using old familiar version but with an updated database. The Converter tool met the requirements of the first group and comprised the following list of features:
- database backup creation: At the first step tool created a data backup and provided it with the log file. This way data safety was insured;
- database clean-up: Formulas containing no longer existing products, bases and components were removed;
- database migration: All the processed data was carefully transferred to the new version database;
- recording: The clean-up and migration process was logged in a neat and detailed way so on the chance of any failure customer would get an informative report with the full error description;
- testing: Data integrity was checked with unit-tests after migration process had finished.
Clean-up tool was a personal application intended for the second group of clients. It allowed to validate the old version database and exclude all no longer existing formulations from it. By means of this tool, the user could skip version upgrade and continue using old software edition with refreshed database.
