Form Filler
Client
The client is 24 Online - large Finnish telecommunication company, specializing in Internet-services providing.
Problem Background
In the rapid world of telecommunication speed can be a determining factor for successful growth. Lots of data and information require custom automation solutions that can ease the procedure of synchronizing data.
The personnel of the company work with a large number of data, information resources and systems. Sometimes there arises a need to transfer accumulated data to third-party databases or convert it into orders to third-party service providers. Transferring thousands of data objects requires painful manual efforts and will undoubtedly put customer's personnel off its key responsibilities, which may result in financial loss for the company. So the need to develop a solution that will allow the staff to use automated form filling was obvious.
Solution Overview
It was agreed to make the system as a small application that will perform automatic batch upload of project order entries into a web form on a third-party service provider website. Program was intended for "from time to time" usage, thus no sophisticated user interface or detailed documentation was needed. No further development of the application was planned.
Application was designed to run under Windows 2000/XP, input file format must have been compatible with Microsoft Excel 2000 and newer. First data row in excel sheet should contain the web form's name attributes of "input" or "select" tags for the corresponding data column. Application is able to handle files with about 10000 rows (about 10 000 form submits).
The application can automatically logon to third-party website and maintain the session (for instance, storing Jsession in a cookie or URL). Also it is able to determine whether the submission of a single entry was successful or caused error in the system. The user can change the frequency of form filling and submitting. Successful submit is determined by comparing contents of the resulting information page and the initial data. If they match then submission is considered successful, and the form can be filled and submitted again.
Benefits for the customer
- Data synchronization was automated reducing manual efforts of the staff and time spent for the task
- Implemented error tracker provides comprehensive information about process results
- All mentioned above allowed to optimize company's internal processes and increase efficiency
Used technologies and products
Java 1.5, Apache POI library, The Jakarta Commons HttpClient library, The Jakarta Commons Logging library.
Project workload
The project team comprised 2 people per 2 weeks project duration
- Learn more about
