Tips on IMS development

Here are some tips on information management system web application development from my work. Most are platform independent and can be easily applied to different platforms and technologies. They can also be applied to non-web applications, and are actually general design tips.

• Menu. The menu can be dynamically generated from database. This allows flexible configuration and update. If there are multiple roles, each can be configured to draw from the pool of menu items. For this first get a javascript menu template, then create it dynamically. For better performance and void regenerate it each time, such menu can be generated once at creation time, then be stored for later use.
  
  
• Roles and permissions. There can be many roles. The permission can be configured this way: for each item that needs permission control, say we need read/write/delete, then can use a string such as "742172". Here each digit stands for the permission setting of one role. The value of a digit is the combined sum of 4/2/1, which stands for read/write/delete, similar to unix.
  
  
• Workflow. A table can be used for this, which records stage and stage transition settings. Each role may have different permissions at different stages. Such a table can easily store these information.
  
  
• Email. If there are emails to be sent, an admin interface can be provided to configure the subject, body and other fields of emails. For specific information, provide some macros that the administrator can use, which will be replaced by program later.
  
  
• HTML Form. Can create a self-defined framework, instead of using that of such as .NET's control. This allows more flexibility, and can be more efficient since .NET's control may keep more information than necessary. To store the state/parameters, such as when you need to ask for confirmation of user, use hidden HTML control.
  
  
• HTML Form fields. The form fields settings can be managed in the database. So there is no need to go to code for update. Everything can be configured from database. Like label management below, adding a new field can automatically insert itself to a table in database with default settings. Given each form and each form field (if needed) a class name, and control display properties from CSS.
  
  
• Label management. An admin interface can be provided for this. When a tag is put on a page, it can automatically check if it's in database already, if not then insert itself in as a unique tag name. This allows domain experts to change it, and frees programmers from such ad-hoc, trivial but time-consuming and distracting chores.
  
  
• The use of coding. Any systematic categorizing paradigms can be implemented by coding for ease of control and ease of versioning. Say we can use the starting code of 001 to stand for version 1, 002 to stand for version 2, etc. This can apply to many things and is highly useful.
  
  
• Use classes as much as possible, decouple business logic from interface files.