The client is engaged in the business of providing insurance to some of the nation's most prestigious professional and amateur sports organizations, sports governing bodies, and sport clubs. The client offers sports club programs to provide insurance under a governing body’s “master” policy at a lower price than would be available otherwise. Each club program has different rules and eligibility questions, as well as different coverage levels. These policies are sold at different times during the year and with some programs, the clubs can issue their own certificates of insurance to their facilities to prove that they have coverage. The client had an application written in legacy Active Server Pages running on SQL Server, but the application developer was no longer maintaining it.

After returning to the office, these videos would have to be converted, by hand, into screen captures to build the report. Manipulating these images was all done by hand, as was creating the report. Changes to the category or inspection structure would require someone to rearrange the entire report.

Solution

The initial rewrite used the existing data model but converted the application into ASP.NET web forms. The application was slowly expanded to accommodate new sales programs on a “one-off” basis, but as new programs continued to be created, it made sense to stop and refactor the system to better accommodate the programs that they hadn’t created yet. The new system is able to handle all the different types of policies, as well as pricing schemes, without requiring new database tables and pages to be built each time.

During the application process, each program defines its own eligibility criteria, which the user responds to in the form of a questionnaire. The dynamic questionnaire system is can handle yes/no, freeform text entry, and selection lists, as well as responding to answers that disqualify a user from proceeding through the application process. Credit card purchases are made through Authorize.net’s online payment gateway, and reports are made available to both the client and the client’s governing bodies and clubs.

After the purchase is made, both the client and the policy purchasers have the ability to generate certificate of insurance, both for their evidence of coverage and additional insured certificates. These certificates are generated dynamically using a template system that outlines the coverages and policy limits for each certificate template being used. These templates are tied to the policies purchased by the club or individual so they have a complete history of their purchases in the online portal site.

An API has been added to support one of the client's partners. The partner sends certificate requests via the API and once the data is validated, the certificate is sent back as an attachment. Updates to the certificate within the portal will trigger updates to be sent to the client via a background process that calls the partner's API. 

This project started in January 2012 and the client is still using the system today; however, the site is being rebuilt using a .NET 6 API and Angular front end. The database will remain roughly the same. 

Tools and Technologies

• Visual Studio 2013
• ASP.NET Web Forms
• C#
• SQL Server 2008/2012
• jQuery