Nick Engineered

Situation

The TR-File Generator application was a delight to build in the earlier days of my career.

While working at Vigilant Technologies on federal procurement operations, I discovered a need for automation. We ran an initiative to update our service and product catalog with a federal agency, so that we could bid on solicitations.

The process of updating or adding catalog entries was arduous. We were required to email text files as attachments with a specific format to update our prices in the agency’s system. Often times, when done by hand these files were kicked back with errors pointing to a field that was incorrect. I developed an automation to handle the generation of these text files (aka TR-files).

Action

This application was a C# Windows Forms application with features including:

• TR-file pre-validation: Files could be validated before sending them to federal mail server. This was often run by default on TR file generation.
• Excel spreadsheet interoperability: The application pulled catalog information from a pre-existing master spreadsheet in order to generate TR-files.
• TR-file generation: TR-files were generated from what was selected in a running instance of the master catalog spreadsheet.