This is a reflection and continuation of my previous post, about the business logic of an application. (https://dev.to/zoltanhalasz/business-logic-of-an-application-my-experience-as-newbie-programmer-1oh0)
I very much struggle to model the real world business processes to application business logic, and this resulted in my newest article:
https://mydev-journey.blogspot.com/2019/11/why-microsoft-excel-is-so-popular-my.html
The main idea is, to somehow extract from the realm of Microsoft Excel all processes that can be automated with an application. But this needs careful analysis of the underlying process.
My current endeavor is to automate another internal process, which collects, consolidates, corrects and checks internal VAT reporting data and can prepare statutory reports for VAT (Value-Added-Tax) in the local economy.
What do you think, do you have experience in reducing company bureaucracy by automating existing (obviously Excel-based) processes?
Top comments (4)
I'm currently working on something like this and my conclusion is that we most of the times forget another huge Excel plus: everyone is familiar with its interface. This is one of the things we almost never take into account and end up taking away something people already know and shove shiny, but less functional, new interfaces on their faces.
Because of this I started working on perfect a Clojure library for abstracting Excel files: you have a tree of values that after parsing you can store wherever you like (Datomic or a document store for instance) and can then be versioned, transformed and then turned into an Excel file back again.
This would let you apply business logic without forcing new interfaces on coworkers and would make the update/change process much more easier considering that you won't have a frontend to change everytime.
Very interesting, I didn't know about this. I am working on .Net projects, is your library compatible with .net? What is Clojure?
Clojure is a LISP that runs on the JVM and on the CLR. So, yes, by making adjustments in theory it should run on .Net (it is one of the things I was thinking about, but unfortunately at the moment the development is paused).
The cool thing of doing this with Clojure is that by having by default a very nice management of hashmaps (clojure.org/guides/learn/hashed_co...) it makes dealing with hierarchical data a breeze. Oh, and no objects, just functions and data :)
Normally my applications upload data from excel to an MS SQL database and store/query/transform data from the tables there => then generate reports. My current endevours is to find easy methods to do this upload/export, and then work with the data in the application. I am studying now .net core razor pages for a web-based approach. Anyway thanks for the info.