The MTDA serves the needs of approximately eight to ten local users and a number of remote offices.  It consists of three separate programs—Informal Rulemaking, Formal Rulemaking, and Selection Order.  The first two of these programs manage the process of rulemaking and are concerned largely with date values and with comments about the process.  Some of the date fields are automatically calculated—for example, a due date is calculated to be a certain number of workdays after the date entered for a particular event.  These can be somewhat complex, where the nature of the calculations are dependent upon the kind of the rule concerned (determined by a part of the string value that identifies the rule) or by an additional value entered by the user.  The Selection Order program manages elections to Marketing Order Committees and is a smaller and simpler program.

The highlights of our work on this project are as follows:

• We corrected many existing calculated fields and we added many new ones.  We made enhancements enabling the user to change the rules (rather than having to call in a programmer), we created a table where users can edit the rules (i.e. the number of workdays) on which the calculated fields are based.  We also created a table where a user can add and edit holidays that need to be taken into account in workday calculations.
• We evaluated every report in the program.  Many needed significant revisions.  We created some new reports.  We reformatted every report in order to improve clarity and display aspects.
• We created a special Alert report that is emailed automatically every workday and lets a specialist know if rules under his management are close to or past important deadlines.
• We redesigned the Selection Order process, creating a Selection Order Number as a primary key and completely reorganizing the table that manages this program.  We created a functionality for creating new records in this program whereby the user chooses a Marketing Order Committee from a dropdown and the functionality creates a new Selection Order record.  We created a utility table to allow a user to edit the Committee values that provide the choice list selection.
• Using capabilities of Access 97, we developed a Query and Report Creation functionality allowing a user to use the Access wizards to create queries and reports and save them in a special location for later use.  We provided training to our clients on this and found this to be of great value to them.
• We created a Login protection functionality for MTDA.
• We resolved all known errors and redesigned all menus and interfaces.

The application was written in MS Access and Visual Basic, running on NT Server.  Report and analyses are provided with Access reports.

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