September 2018: First testing of bulk upload

What the Development Team worked on in September

During September, following preparing the bulk upload API for the first phase of testing, the team have been working on a number of improvements around handling errors. 

A lot of work has also been done this month with Researchers and Clinicians in order to understand how the Directory can best support their needs. We have run two sessions – a focus group on understanding the barriers for using the Directory and a Design session to understand how best to improve the Directory to meet their needs. 

 

New changes 

Changes have been made to: 

  • Creating a new field titled ‘Records Failed’ to highlight the number of records failed in a submission. 
  • Creating a new field titled ‘Records Passed’ to highlight the number of records that have passed successfully in a submission. 
  • Where a submission has errors, enabling the successful ‘passed’ records to be able to be easily committed. 
  • Enabling a queue function to process one submission of a maximum of 10,000 records at a time so that multiple submissions can be sent in one go but the API can process them accordingly. 

 

Supporting documentation and resources 

A lot of work has also been done in setting up the right support documentation and processes to underpin this work, such as: 

  • Mapping from the sample data to the aggregated collections. 
  • Updates to the Vendor API User Guides 
  • Utilising the Trello tool to allow for testing feedback 
  • Updates to the Swagger technical documentation 

 

Bug Fixes 

We have addressed the following main bugs: 

  • Errors occurring when sending data to the queue. 

 

Upcoming work from October onward 

The team are already busy working on planning for the next phase of work of improving the performance of the API to be able to handle larger volumes of submissions. 

More work will also be done with Researchers and Clinicians following the sessions in September. This will comprise of another focus group in Edinburgh and some remote user trials of prototype ‘new design’ Directory’s.