Canyon Digital Scales Dynamic Data Management Solution with ASP.NET AJAX and Reporting
Industries:
Technology & SoftwareChallenge
To be able to scale its land asset management system, Canyon Digital Solutions needed to customize the core product to empower each government agency to design their own dynamic datasets and reports on demand.
Solution
Canyon Digital Solutions uses Progress Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX to build a fully customizable database and Telerik Reporting for integrated modular reports.
Result
Canyon Digital Solutions achieves rapid and cohesive development by utilizing interface user controls and UX, freeing up time for business logic and application organization.
Full Story
Challenge
Canyon Digital Solutions supports U.S. government institutions and businesses with handling complex project operations. When they first built their land asset management software, Canyon Digital Solutions quickly realized every institution organized their work differently and clients wanted to see their process logic reflected in the digital tool. Canyon Digital Solutions had to design for flexibility and customization.
To scale their system, Canyon Digital Solutions needed to accommodate the specific needs and varying in-house development skillsets of government agencies. Their biggest challenge was to adapt the core product to seamlessly handle database changes. In addition, government agencies wanted to be able to design and run reports based on their own data points.
Canyon Digital Solutions opted to make the database dynamic and the reporting run on-demand and searched for an integrated solution.
Solution
Canyon Digital Solutions looked to Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX from the onset. Paired with the integrated Telerik Reporting, they were able to build a smooth, dynamic and scalable application, where custom data lists and metrics speak to each other.
“We did see other products, but they would just never have the cohesiveness that we were getting from Telerik at the time,” says Eric Dahl, Lead Software Architect for Canyon Digital Solutions.
To give customers full freedom to create their own datasets was of the essence for Canyon Digital Solutions. They relied on Telerik UI to pack diverse components into the application interface—tabs, columns, grids and easy-to-customize value fields—that agencies can pick from and configure. They then paired it with the extensible Telerik Reporting that would allow government agencies to simply drag and drop data fields into reports for a specific project.
“Agencies design all these fields and then we auto-draw them with the Telerik components with data binding,” Dahl adds. “They select which columns of data they want to be in the report, and then they can create an unlimited number of reports off of 10 or 15 templates we provide.”
Imperative to the success of the project was the option to visualize and export reports. With its extremely fast rendering, interactive graphs and broad range of supported export formats, Telerik Reporting proved to be just the web report designer to complement the user experience. “We’re highly relying on Telerik components and it makes it so fast to develop our reports,” says Dahl.
Result
Canyon Digital Solutions has successfully switched to a customer-demand model of development, enabling any government agency to fully customize the CityVerse project management system to their processes.
Dahl notes that the complete Telerik UI feature set of over 100 AJAX.NET controls has contributed to improved development efficiency: “The key is rapid development by alleviating interface user controls and UX and letting the developers do a lot of the business logic and application organization.”
Provided that reporting is key to their business model, CDS found that the integration between Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX and Telerik Reporting was central to successfully furthering their product development: “The fact that there is already the paging built-in, the UI, UX, screen sizes vs. print views, the export models, all those things are crucial to our success and have been crucial to our customers’ success.”
The flexibility of Telerik Reporting has allowed them to implement possibly the most mission-critical element—dynamic management—while also significantly cutting development time: “The fact that we were able to integrate a dynamic scenario into Telerik Reporting has been huge. Just the ability that our customers can run custom reports and build them on demand without ever contacting us has been a big time-saver for us.”