ADA for Disability Office¶

This page gives an overview of Ada, the financial management app for Disability Office, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description¶

Ada is an application for managing income and expenditure for students with disabilities.

Service Status¶

Ada is currently live.

Currently there is no planned roadmap for the future of this service; however, the service is integral to the administration of students with disabilities and each year there are normally some tweaks made to the system.

Contact¶

Technical queries and support should be directed to uis-cloud@lists.cam.ac.uk and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service.

Environments and Client¶

Ada is a Windows Forms app so is currently deployed to and run from a file server. The application is run over the network on the UIS File Server. This is secured by file permissions, by the need to be run on a University machine belonging to a University Windows Domain, and by pass through Windows login to the database server. Membership of the following group will give access.

uis-sec-microsoft-.net-drive-access

Access to environment is determined by which folder the executable is run from. The application is started by running the UIS.Ada.Ada.exe executable.

Ada is currently deployed to the following environments (this assumes the Z drive is mapped to \\blue.cam.ac.uk\group as per standard university build):

Name	File Folder
Production	Z:\J Share\Applications\DotNet\Academic\Disability\Ada\Ada Live
Pending	Z:\J Share\Applications\DotNet\Academic\Disability\Ada\Ada Pending
Development	Z:\J Share\Applications\DotNet\Academic\Disability\Ada\Ada Dev

Source code¶

The source code for Ada is spread over the following repository folders:

Repository	Description
Ada	The Windows Forms application
BEL	Holds business objects
BPL	Holds business processes; knits together BEL and DAL
AdaUnitTests	Unit tests (needs revision)

Technologies used¶

The following gives an overview of the technologies Ada is built on.

Category	Language	Framework(s)
Database Server	MS SQL	SQL Server 2019
Client Code	VB.NET	4.6.1

Nuget package manager is also used to control versions of integrated code such as EPPlus (used for Excel interoperability). Full details are outside the scope of this document but can be seen through Visual Studio.

Database¶

Ada's data resides on a Microsoft SQL Server (stu-sql1.blue.cam.ac.uk)

Environment	Instance
Live	Live
All development	UAT

Access is done through Windows Active Directory, meaning there is no need to store passwords, it's all integrated. To have access you need to either be in the SQL Administrators group or be in the following group:

BLUE\disab-disability-access

IDE¶

Ada is developed using Microsoft's Visual Studio (minimum version recommended 2019). There is a solution file that contains projects; those projects are reflected in the different folders in stored in the repository and listed above.

Operational documentation¶

The following gives an overview of how Ada is deployed and maintained.

How and where Ada is deployed¶

Deployment for Ada is extremely simple - files are copied over from your build folder in Visual Studio to the folder holding the environment you are deploying to.

Deploying a new release¶

Make sure no files are open in the destination document - that is that the target version of Ada is not open, then copy files over.

Monitoring¶

Currently no monitoring is carried out; the userbase is small and there are excellent relations between the users and the developer.

Debugging¶

Debugging can only be done through Visual Studio, running the app natively in it.

Service Management¶

The Team responsible for this service is Jackson Team.

The Tech Lead for this service is TBC.

The Service Owner for this service is meh37.

The Service Manager for this service is TBC.

The Product Manager for this service is TBC.