DnB Application
The client needed
an application that was available on the intranet, but would go
out on the internet to obtain critical credit related data from
D&B. D&B provides an API to extract business related information
through an API that allows subscribers to retrieve payment information,
payment history, credit rating and marketing information. The data
retrieved will then be used by the credit agent to make critical
credit approval decisions which are effective and efficient. Since
the data is subscription based, there was a need to store and make
available any data that was recently retrieved without going to
the main D&B server.
The application
that was provided as a solution to the clients needs provides the
following features:
Authentication of Users: In order to establish a login
session to DnB application, all users must first log in with DnB
Application user id and password for validation to take place. Once
the user's details have been successfully validated, they are then
enabled to commence their searching and product ordering.
Customer selection: A user is allowed to provide basic
criteria to look for a customer. The application will look up the
local cache, if data is available, it will provide the basic data
plus an indication of what data is available. It will also look
up the remote D&B database for matching customers and provide the
list to the user who can then make a rational decision as to whether
it is the same customer, retrieve from cache or retrieve from the
remote database.
Product Selection: The user can choose from any of
the products that the client has subscribed to with D&B. Based on
the user's choice, the application will retrieve from the cache
or from the remote database.
Fresh / Cached data: All data retrieved from D&B is
stored in local database along with a time stamp. This allows the
user to make a decision with respect to the currency of the data.
The user is allowed to make a choice when presented with the data
to choose data from the cache or retrieve fresh from the remote
database.
Technologies
used: The application uses a secure a protocol that
is proprietary to D&B to communicate with the remote database. The
APIs used here are provided by D&B. These APIs use XML as the means
of sending and receiving data. The application is programmed using
the DNB toolkit, J2EE components such as JDBC, Servlets and JSP,
Oracle. It is deployed on a Sun Solaris machine. It also uses Oracle
as the primary repository for the cache implementation.
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