Design Decisions

Like the applications in previous BackOffice® Developer's Guide installments—the Corporate Media Library and CML/LitCrit—the Performance Tracking (PT) application is built on the Microsoft® Windows® DNA platform. This architecture is described in Overview of Windows DNA.

The PT application stores and displays information about individuals' performance in a corporate training center. It can be extended to work in other arenas, such as schools. The application stores performance-related records in a Microsoft SQL Server™ database. It provides access to these records through a set of Web pages that users can view in Microsoft Internet Explorer; the Web pages are hosted onInternet Information Services (IIS). Custom COM objects perform the business logic.

Tracking the certifications of a fictional company's employees introduces localization into the business problem. As enterprises span borders, their employees must be able to share data despite differences in language and data formatting conventions.

The PT application evolved considerably during the design process. When the development team undertook the project, their goal was stated quite simply:

To build a Windows DNA application that uses XML to implement localized user interfaces in response to the locale settings of a user's Web browser.

During the design process, the development team decided to divide the application into two parts: the PT Admin application for administrators with access to all the data, and the PT User application for users with various degrees of access to the data. Scenario 3 of the BDG focuses on the PT Admin application, describing its design and implementation in detail. Much of the design for the PT User application is also described in this scenario, because the two applications share the same database and business-services tier. The PT User application will be implemented in Scenario 4.

The following topics describe the PT Admin application's design:

• Designing the PT Application User Interface describes the appearance and functionality of the screens that present the PT Admin application to the user.
• Designing the PT Application User-Services Tier focuses on the XML and Internet Explorer technologies that implement the user interface.
• Designing the PT Application Business-Services Tier discusses the services provided by COM objects in the application, such as handling locale-sensitive data and building localized user interfaces from text strings stored as XML data.
• Designing the PT Application Data-Services Tier describes the application's database schema, the stored procedures used to implement its business logic, and how the application addresses the issue of globalizing data.
• Technologies and Products in the PT Application discusses the Microsoft tools, applications, and technologies that provide the application's Windows DNA platform.
• Security in the PT Application describes the application's security requirements and how they are implemented.
• Designing the Globalized PT Application describes the design considerations for creating a globalized application.
• Final PT Application Specifications describes the PT Admin application's appearance and functionality following the design and implementation process. The LitWare test team used this specification to perform functional testing on the application.