Table of Contents

Current working version: http://umbc.edu/research/grant-database/

Features

  1. Search: keyword based on Investigator, Title, and Department Description
  2. Browse: records sortable on any field, and change the number of records per page
  3. Update: protected to select users using UMBC WebAuth, file upload using CSV file
  4. Web interface for adding users to be able to update (the login is piggy backing on the UMBC WebAuth)
    WebAuth was used to specify particular users that can have access.
    See http://www.umbc.edu/oit/iss/syscore/wiki/Using_WebAuth_in_the_Core_Web_Environment
    1. The admin site uses the WebAuth to check for login (note it is not completely tied in so that when you logout of WebAuth you will still be logged into the admin page)
  5. Checked for possible security flaws (such as SQL injection attacks)
  6. The look of the public site matches that of the Research site

Technical Specifications

The following are technical details of various components and functionalities of the Grants web view application.

Specifications of the Data File

See how to update data for an explanation of what the data file is, where it is used, and when it is used.

If the data file is generated by UMBCs Peoplesoft, then it should already be in the correct format (as of April 2006). The file format can be corrupted by opening and saving with other programs such as Microsoft Excel. The data file format requirements:

  1. One record per line
  2. The first line will be ignored since that is where the column headers are placed
  3. Each field will be surrounded by double quotation mark " (U+0022)
  4. Fields will be separated by a comma , (U+002C) with no space between the quotation mark and the comma: “field 1”,”field 2”
  5. The fields for a record are in the following order
    1. Contract
    2. Begin Date
    3. End Date
    4. Primary Principal Investigator
    5. Title
    6. Department Description
    7. Sponsor Name
    8. Type
  6. The format for dates is MM/DD/YYYY where MM is the numeric representation of the month with leading zero number, DD is the Numeric representation of the day with leading zero number, and YYYY is a full numeric representation of the year (all four digits)

Old Data Files

The data files that are used to update are saved to http://umbc.edu/research/grant-database/upload/ . The files are prepended with a timestamp formatted as <Year><Month><Day><Hour><Minute><Second> with each being the numeric representation with leading zero number and Hour is the 24-hour representation.