Client had a requirement in his project to verify the license expiry of appraisers in the system on daily basis and accordingly generate email to the AMC users informing about such appraisers. All the appraisers who are the users of client application must have a valid appraiser license from Appraisal Sub-committee which is a Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.

Project Overview:

The project is basically an appraisal management solution which serves the lenders, mortgage insurers, attorneys and home owners. Orders are created from the system as well as imported from the lender external system. The orders are imported using GDMS provided web services by a system integration layer which maps and authenticates the orders raw XML and then imports into application database. It is a multi-role web portal for appraisers, AMCs and brokers and mainly developed using ASP.NET 4.0, C#, jQuery, ADO.NET, WCF and MS SQL Server.

Solution:

To meet the requirement, vteam #311’s resource Rehman Adeel had to look for the ASC.GOV web service to verify the appraiser’s licenses. ASC.GOV exposes a web service for the clients to retrieve the appraiser information. This web service can be called from a windows service to run on daily basis. So, solution was pretty simple.

Challenge:

The real big issue in this requirement was to get license verification of each appraiser and there were more than 4 thousand appraisers in the system. So, it seemed that there will be a need to call the ASC.GOV web service based on number of users i.e.; 4 thousand times which can further increase with time.

Idea and Implementation:

Instead of calling the web service 4 thousand times, Rehman came up with a solution to call the web service just once but generate filter conditions for all appraisers intelligently so that it returns all those appraisers who have expired licenses with only one web service call.

Example:

The filter conditions to pass to the web service were formed intelligently with the combination of following parameters:

• Appraiser License Number
• Appraiser First Name
• Appraiser Last Name
• Appraiser State in which they have the license

These four different attributes were used to uniquely identify a single appraiser. The combination of the above mentioned filters with equality operator gave him the exact required results. Then he created a windows service to run periodically to check the appraiser’s license and generated an email which was sent to the AMC users.

Benefit:

The major benefit was related to the optimized and intelligent logic instead making thousands of calls to a web service. Thousands calls could have worked but where Client has achieved following major benefits by using above mentioned solution:

• By just calling the ASC.GOV web service once for all the appraisers and passing the combination of filters, we have avoided the overhead of making a huge number of calls to the web service due to which system might have had responded slowly  So, it’s an efficient solution for the license verification of the appraisers.