This project under developement and is not ready for release.
MissNancy is my pet project that ports a MS Access application (written almost 10 years ago for my local church) to a Web app. The church has a HUGE Vacation Bible School event each year and needed a way to track the Children, Workers, Buses, Classes, and Neighborhoods. The application was originally written in MS Access because I needed to build it very quickly, app was mostly data entry, and all the users were located in the same office space/network.
Because I wanted a pattern that I could follow for other Line of Business Applications, I decided to use the application to establish the patterns I intend to follow.
I used the following in this project:
- PetaPoco
- ExtJs4
- Only the layers that I absolutely needed
- MVC 3
There are some (probably many) things that should not be taken as best practice, but I will continue to refactor this project as I have new learnings.
Some lessons learned from moving from the MS Access development to .Net/Javascript world:
- Primary key in each table simply 'Id' (makes coding each object easier and the ExtJs models/stores easier to copy/paste during development)
- No table/objects named with reserved words like I did in the original MS Access application. (Class, duh)
- Table/object name singlar (Bus, Worker, Classroom)
- Table/object names should avoid difficult pluralization words like Children (use Student) when possible
- Remember MS Access 'true' is '-1' used abs(active) = 1 because the MS Access front end was still also used on the same sql db
- At least for me, development takes a lot longer for web apps...maybe I was this slow when I first started with Access too. *sigh
This work was done for Knoxville Christian Center, see here - http://knoxvillechristiancenter.org - for details about the church.
Make sure you ask someone about Miss Nancy and her story....