Introduction – Limerick GAA Development Draw

The Limerick GAA Development Draw operates a public draw for all members of GAA clubs in Limerick city and county. Its mandate is to provide a mechanism to raise funds at the club level that are used to further develop the sport and club within its local community. The Draw has 74 clubs and many thousands of members partaking each month.

Problem – Manual Processes and Legacy System

The Development Draw team used an old DOS/FoxPro based system to maintain the database of all clubs and members. While the DOS system runs on Windows XP, Microsoft have made no secret of the fact that they are phasing out support for legacy systems and hence there is no guarantee the system will still work in three to five years time. The DOS application does not provide any form of audit trail nor any assistance in a number of day-to-day workflows, such as cheque processing. When a draw completes, a large amount of manual effort is required to communicate the results.

Challenge – Implement Modern System Processes and Migrate Legacy Data

When planning the new system, it was decided to implement an Intranet web-based application and to take the opportunity to integrate with the real world as much as possible. For example, the system should automatically send out SMS messages to notify winners and it should automatically upload draw results to the public GAA website. All data from the old DOS system must be ported to the new system in order to facilitate quick migration to the new system during the annual downtime between draws in the first two months of each year.

When a Draw takes place, it will be in a local pub near one of the member GAA clubs, which often has poor or no Internet connectivity. However, the new system needed to provide a mechanism to record results on a Draw Night along with last minute changes to the draw members.

Solution – ASP.Net Web Application with Web Services and WinForms

ASP.Net 3.5 and C# were used to implement a private web based system for administering the draw. This web application provided automated accounting for received cheques and easy printing of cheque receipts. This replaced a manual process of writing out receipts in duplicate and accounting for each cheque using pen and paper in a big red T accounts ledger.
The application records a complete audit trail of changes to a Draw Member, so the team can now answer questions on how, why and when a given Member was added to or removed from the draw. It provides financial reports on each Club automatically, removing the need to transcribe entries from the T accounts ledger.
A desktop application (WinForms) was built to run the Draw Night in a completely offline mode. It uses Web Services to download the Draw Night information, such as which prizes are on offer and the Clubs and Members taking part. The application allows for offline modification of Member information and recording of Draw Results as the draw takes place. On return to the office, it uses Web Services to upload the recorded results and changes to the live system. The upload of results triggers automated SMS messages to all winning parties, the distribution of the winners list via email and the web and an automated accounting of the month end for each Clubs account. This replaces many hours of manual data entry and processing.
Finally, the Legacy data was imported into the new system using a combination of a C# Console application, Excel and SQL, resulting in a quick deployment of the new system within the existing Draw team with all data intact and ready to use.

Technologies

ASP.Net 3.5, C#, Web Services, SQL Server 2005, WinForms, Console, SMS