Fire Certification Tracker

Suffolk County Fire Academy
Yephank, NY USA

Fire Certification Tracker was designed for the Suffolk County Fire Academy (SCFA) to help track training and certification for New York fire fighters.

This application allows administrators to schedule classes, register instructors, enroll fire fighters, and track certifications. Administrators may add users and assign user roles to the application dynamically. They can view classes on the calendar page and add, edit, or remove their corresponding registrations as necessary. In addition, volunteer instructors use the registration page in Fire Certification Tracker to assign grades, award certificates, and provide course feedback.

Busy students use Fire Certification Tracker to check training schedules and manage certifications online. Students can access the application remotely to schedule training, review grades, and print certificates.

Application size and scope

One Microsoft SQL Server 2005 comprises 45 database tables, 18 database views and 200 web pages. The "Registrations" table contains the largest number of records with over 500,000 records.

Approximately 20 internal users (administrators and teachers) and 250 external users (students) process 10,000 transactions each month.

The project

I created this application in less than three months. The Iron Speed Designer portion only took two weeks.

Code extensions and customizations

We wrote 3,000 lines of custom code for this application. Customizations were complete in approximately one month. Major customizations include:

Adding a MediaChase calendar control to display training schedule.

Adding a multiple document interface to prevent users losing their place when switching to other areas of the application.

Adding functionality to calculate an instructor's travel distance from class.

Integrating a custom reporting tool called Custom AdHoc Report Generator to define and manage custom reports.

Incorporating Crystal Reports allowing users to print certificates.

Page layout customizations

Fire Certification Tracker uses a dynamic menu system that is populated at run-time. Page tabs, visible on parent pages, show relationships and provide easy navigation between records. Tabs are added dynamically to each page and reflect any changes made in your database.

We used Telerik Web Controls to integrate online help into the application. Content is updated dynamically for every page.

Fire Certification Tracker is also available in multiple languages. We enhanced the standard localization features in Iron Speed Designer to update page and control translations dynamically at run-time. Control text is altered using metadata which stores the translation text.

Iron Speed Designer impact

We saved six person-months of development time and $30,000 in development costs using Iron Speed Designer. The project would have taken six months to complete by hand. Given our client's time constraints, it would be impossible to create the necessary pages and controls without the tool. Iron Speed Designer decreased development time and allowed us to finish the project early.

Next steps

SCFA will continue to add users; however, they do not plan to extend the application further.

About the developer

Mike Landi graduated from Farmingdale State College with a Bachelor's degree in Security Systems. This experience made him proficient in computer networking, security, and risk management. Mike has been working at Light Speed Solutions since January 2009 as a Solutions Architect. He specializes in ASP.NET web development and is very comfortable with Iron Speed Designer, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework. Prior to this, he worked as a software developer and system administrator for Clear-Cut Computing. He designed, developed, and maintained computer security software solutions and was exposed to .NET, Java, and cross-platform development.