Rich Internet Application: Veterinary Pharmaceutical Calculator · 433 words posted 01/09/2004 07:40 AM
Many Flash applications are hidden behind user logins or secure pages; today I’ll start an occasional series of screen captures showing some of the Rich Internet Applications in which I’ve been involved.
Online pharmacies face the challenge of helping doctors prescribe the correct dosage for their patients. In conjunction with Imagiforce, I recently built a pharmaceutical calculator (link opens in popup window, JavaScript required) to help veterinarians derive the proper dosage based on the patient weight, recommended dosage, and clinical indications. In order to keep the screen capture as short as possible, I’ll explain the application’s context here.
The store and shopping cart are built in classic asp with an HTML interface. First, the veterinarian logs in and then selects a drug. Next, the veterinarian selects a patient and then proceeds to the calculator.
The calculator is built entirely in Flash, and communicates to a SQL Server database via Flash Remoting and a C# .NET assembly. All of the information you’ll see in the screen capture is pulled from the database based on the specific patient and drug. The application is very "contingent"; almost any selection (such as dosage form) affects all of the following selections. Once the calculation is complete, the veterinarian adds the order to the shopping cart, and Flash/.NET passes control of the application back to classic HTML/asp.
Mike and Karen Force designed both the interface and the database for the application. My role was to design the Flash interactions and write all of the ActionScript, in addition to writing the C# assembly. Our biggest challenge was to map the possible drug parameters to a logical flowchart that could be programmed in Flash and .NET. In the end, we opted for a default calculator to handle most of the drugs, as well as custom calculators to handle outliers. Either way, the appropriate calculator loads into the shell movie dynamically (you’ll notice a progress bar loading the calculator in the lower right portion of the screen).
We tried an early version of the calculator using XML and SOAP, but it was just too slow. In order to succeed, the calculator needs to feel like a desktop application. We changed the architecture to Flash Remoting and now the application’s response time is exceptional.
Notes on the video: The screen capture is 1MB, and requires Flash player 6 or higher. Please ensure that your monitor’s resolution is 1024×768 or higher, and turn up your speakers a bit to hear the narration.
Click here to view the screen capture (this will open a new window in your browser). Thank you for watching.
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