Although used widely in many data models, submitting large data grids with significant amount of data have always been a problem in web application projects. There are many industry specific examples where a web user has to paste a large data table into a web application. A health insurance rating tool is one such example. Insurance companies build such Excel tools to provide quotes to companies with thousands of employees. The underwriters can then enter census data like employee age and gender to receive a quote estimate. However, processing this much information can be very tasking on a web application.
Server machines are superior processing computers and can actually work data much faster than a desktop computer. However, the network overhead and web browser limitations come into play when you try to send back and forth vast amounts of data. SpreadsheetWEB’s designer module can handle big tables seamlessly thanks to its optimized API and calculation engine.
Let’s take an example. Here we have an insurance rating model that can take employee data for up to 10,000 rows. Data can be copied into the Input page, and the tool will give total premiums for six different plans in the Output sheet. Ratings, tables, and calculations are of course kept in the background and we wouldn’t want our users to interact with those pages.
Pushing the Tool to the Web
This tool will not allow our end users to tamper with any data or calculations when converted into a web application. Underwriters can go into this web page, copy employee data from any source, and paste it into the input table, just like they could in Excel.
Table pagination significantly lowers load times, something that still haunts most web-based platforms. Once we’re done entering data, we can go to the output page to get the premium results for six different scenarios. It only takes a few seconds to pass the data of 10,000 rows and get the calculations back from the server. SpreadsheetWEB’s grid control has been optimized to handle this type of large data transfers between the browser and the server.
Data can be saved into the integrated Microsoft SQL database by pressing the submit button and can be exported later for reporting. You don’t have to be an SQL expert to work with this data as records can be accessed from the web interface.
You don’t have to compromise functionality when moving your data models to the web. SpreadsheetWEB makes this process much easier than custom coding everything, while providing performance close to what you experience with desktop applications.
