.NET Legacy Application Support
Daily physician ratings data feed
The Iowa Clinic publishes patient star ratings for its physicians. Those ratings come out of a separate system, so the site needed a way to pull them in and keep the directory current. I built the daily job that does it.
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What went into it
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Scheduled daily trigger
A scheduled task on the server called an endpoint in the application once a day. On that hosting setup, triggering the work over HTTP was the practical way to run a recurring job.
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Retrieving the file over FTP
The endpoint opened an FTP connection to the ratings source and pulled down the day's file, a pipe-delimited flat file rather than a tidy API response.
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Parsing and mapping to the directory
Parsed the rows, matched each to the right physician, and updated the ratings table behind the directory. The mapping was the fiddly part, since the two systems identified doctors differently.
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Working inside a legacy .NET application
The site is an ASP.NET MVC application on .NET Framework. The job was built into the existing application rather than added as a separate service, which kept it deployable the same way as the rest of the site.
Screens
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Physician search results showing the imported star ratings
