FormiX

As part of modernizing business practices, a client requested a new application to facilitate the digital collection of field data using their employee's mobile devices. With a split of user devices between iOS and Android, we utilized React Native to allow the development of a unified experience across platforms in a single code base. Together with the mobile application a web portal was developed to allow office staff to perform administrative tasks and to add new entries to the database for automatic form assignment and generation.

Development

For this project, I acted as team lead and was responsible for guiding the development of the project as the SCRUM master but also reporting directly to the client in weekly meetings. With a small team throughout the development of this project, I was responsible for large portions of both the web and mobile applications.

To address challenges in the mobile space, particularly around offline data caching, we opted to utilize GraphQL as our API endpoint with custom resolvers built around form generation and common workflows of users. This allowed the team to develop a mobile application that supported an offline mode, allowing users to complete work while in the field in low or no network settings and sync data when a connection was available.

The web application primarily acted as an administrative interface for managers to review and verify data entered by field technicians. This allowed a greater level of control of all available data and form structures. This complex data allowed the implementation of dynamic form generation based on previously submitted form content and expected scheduling based on site or equipment metrics.

Deployment

To align with existing software deployed by our client the web application was packaged into a Node Alpine Docker image which is run using Azure Web App Service. This application is connected to Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake, and an Azure MySQL database. As the architect for the project, it was my responsibility to manage the configuration of these services as well as the migration of existing Microsoft Access DB content into the newly provisioned MySQL database to align with the new application.

For the mobile application, deployment was handled for iOS devices using Apple App Store Connect and for Android through internal downloadables provided to users. Our application also verified version compatibility for users between the mobile application and the API, with built-in backward compatibility for older releases.

This project was interesting for many reasons, the biggest for me being the dual architecture of developing a mobile application alongside a web application. The tightly knit integration between these two applications was exciting to work on and I hope to have more chances for such projects in the future.

Skills: React, React Native, GraphQL, Express, MySQL, RBAC, Docker, Azure