In the GeneXus .NET application for MetLife, the insurance company, the editor directs its dynamic queries through the Web to a database that stores insurance and client-related information. This is how the application offers access to all information related to purchase and sale of insurance policies for more than 2,000 insurance brokers working at MetLife. Up to now, the company used to provide this information on paper, which ended up being not only cumbersome, but also expensive for the company.
Oscar Pescina from Bsystems -a company providing consulting and hosting services to MetLife Génesiswww.metlife.com/Genesis - claims that the application, with more than 75 thousand code-lines, is run on C# against SQL, while some functionalities are offered by JavaScript.
Since the variety of reports required from the application was not determined as a priority, the development called for a dynamic generation of reports based on an in-tray loaded from the main system in AS/400.
This tray has 20 fields in which the information is loaded; the application creates the different reports in a dynamic way, based on the user's profile. Password validation and session checks are used in order to increase security while showing reports and data to each user based on their profile.
Reports obtained from this application vary, ranging from commission-related information (5 or 6 fields) to policy listings (15 to 20 fields), with records ranging from 300 to more than 5,000 per report. Users have report-screening tools that identify the fields for each one of the reports, and enable selection based on similarity, difference, inferiority -less than -, and superiority -higher than.
Since the application identifies the type of data that it is being loaded, in case of numeric data, for example, it provides a number format, and it calculates the total for each field upon report delivery.
Apart from the traditional functionalities common to a news control, it also features a full-web news editor that receives a normal text or a Word-text, and automatically translates it into HTML. In addition, the application's administration (Security, Reports, News, etc) is fully web.
This application is the first one of a series aimed at providing information to MetLife users in an inexpensive and efficient manner, Pescina explained.