Overview

HMPPS Creating Future Opportunities (CFO) utilise the Case Assessment and Tracking System (CATS) to support delivery of https://www.CreatingFutureOpportunities.gov.uk (CFO Evolution). The programme utilises external funding to perform rehabilitative services with offenders in custody and the community. Approx. 600 users from non-government organisations use CATS to record work performed with offenders creating an evidence base that supports performance management, payments to providers, ongoing research and audits from external bodies.

Interfaces/Systems (Backend interface for surfacing the data to the front end)

• Dotnet Core v8 - https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download
• ASP.NET Core

Mechanism (How does it communicate with other systems? Frequency of data pull/push, reporting, events etc)

Interactions with other systems are currently performed using a manual file transfer process between networks, however in the next 12 months it is planned that CATS will interact with ministryofjustice/cfo-dms2

Technology (What's the technology that drives the product? i.e. Azure, java script etc)

• ASP.NET Core (Blazor)
• C#
• LINQ
• Entity Framework
• SQL Server
• HTML, CSS, Javascript

No. of users

600 (approx. 100 concurrent)

Development Environment

This has been developed on Windows 11 using Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider

Queries

Any queries, please contact [email protected]

v1.0-alpha

Building and Tool Restore

The project supports MSSQL and (for development and demo sites) in-memory.

To use an in memory database (only good for development) alter the appsettings for use In-Memory database to true. This will override any other database settings.

{
  "UseInMemoryDatabase": true,
}

For MSSQL server you can use the following. If you are not running local db on windows, you will need to adjust the connection string.

  "DatabaseSettings": {
    "DbProvider": "mssql",
    "ConnectionString": "Server=(LocalDB)\MSSQLLocalDB;Database=CatsDb;Integrated Security=True"
  },

Cake scripts.

To publish the code and generate an indempotent sql update script.

dotnet tool restore
dotnet cake --target Publish 

Database Migrations

There is a powershell script in the root of the folder called ModifyDatabase.ps1. This can be used to

Update the database

Note, the database will automatically update when the server ui project is ran in development environment

.\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action update

Add a migration

Running this will generate a new migration based on changes to the model

.\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action add -MigrationName NewMigrationName

Remove a migration

This will remove the last migration from the code. Useful if you need to make changes due to a malformed migration or a noticed error. Should not be applied to migrations that have been ran against a production envrionment

.\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action remove

Drop the database

This will force a database to be dropped. Useful when developing and you need to re-seed any data etc.

 .\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action drop

Seed the database

This will run the passed through SQL file against the database

.\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action seed -SqlFilePath .\db\seed\001_development_seed.sql

Example usage

Chaining the commands together it is very easy to refresh your local database by running the following

.\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action drop | `
.\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action update | `
.\ModifyDatabase.ps1 -Action seed -SqlFilePath .\db\seed\001_development_seed.sql