APPLiA Data Collection Tool

APPLiA was looking for a partner that could think along both on a business and technical level, to create the strongest possible foundation for their central data platform. The platform was a pilot project that would allow the members of APPLiA to add their individual information and figures, whereby the system would accumulate and compare the data and then offer anonymized data back to the same members. 

Meanwhile, this platform has evolved into a data processing application that incorporates different types of data & household devices. Depending on this type, the tool is going to evaluate different parameters, and either feed back the necessary alerts to the users or not. For example, a notification may pop up if an excessive difference appears in the numerical data between the most recent set of figures and those of the previous period. 

We used Laravel in combination with Backpack, a package that allows us to build administration interfaces in Laravel. This allowed us to meet the client's requirements (user management, companies management, panels management, ...) in a fairly simple way. 

To import the Excels and generate the output, we used Laravel Excel, a wrapper that makes it easier to use PhpSpreadsheet in Laravel applications. In it, we worked out the necessary logic and custom adjustments to get to the desired export (different sheets, complicated Excel formulas to calculate certain output, ...). 

 
To make sure imports and exports run smoothly, these are handled in queues via queued jobs that are taken care of by the supervisor, because generating exports can take some time. In this way, it can work stably without affecting the rest of the application.