Building Custom Software Platforms and Applications for a Multinational Pharmaceutical Corporation

Exceptional Development Velocity Through Close Collaboration

This Dot Labs' engineers and managers inherited the source code of a complex legacy application, and organized the work and the code to deliver three derived applications in less time than anticipated. We collaborated daily with the client, soliciting feedback from stakeholders while identifying the key functionalities that needed to be present in the final product. This process allowed us to quickly deliver highly performant technologies that met the scope of the requirements without exceeding budgetary or time constraints.

Creating Multiple Information Packages System with Offline Support

One of the project's most challenging tasks was creating an Information Package system. Information packages within this project contain not only text but also images and videos, making each package very large, especially for the web. The system provides a mechanism for allowing a given user to access the different packages that they are allowed to access, download those packages, and access them offline. To create a robust and error-resistant solution, the team identified the best mechanism for downloading the information to access it later, leveraging NgRx to manage its entire data fetching and storing solution.

In the final product, when a new version of a package is approved for download, the downloaded version of the cache is cleared, and all data requests are fetched in parallel for performance, but terminated if any of the individual requests fail, making the packages an atomic entity. Any endpoint failure is caught and retried independently, avoiding package download cancellations in case of temporary unavailability. The data is stored in the cache and hydrated into the system by dispatching all the existent NgRx actions from the previous state of the application.

We created a facade for the cache to abstract the underlying data storage mechanism. IndexedDB was chosen for the web version, and SQLite was chosen for the iOS and Windows versions. Custom drivers were created to connect with the facade.

There were also interesting challenges related to the Package Management system, including detecting offline mode and selecting package updates. To detect offline mode, we captured all outgoing requests and checked for network unavailability, in addition to using the Browser Navigator online/offline events and Cordova Wrapper. To detect package updates, we created a polling service that prompts the user with an update found dialog based on the last time a check was made.

Conclusion

This Dot Labs' partnership with the multinational pharmaceutical corporation resulted in the successful development and delivery of three highly performant technologies. Our team's expertise in modern web best practices and technologies allowed us to overcome the project's challenges and create custom software platforms and applications that exceeded our client's expectations.