Professional Project Competency Management

This is the associated training linked up to a particular competency (in this case, “Achieve a level of knowledge to efficiently program in C++”).

A requirement was to import pre-determined competencies and their associated training. The data was in the form of Excel spreadsheets. I wrote a rake task that parsed the data and inserted it into the DB. I used a file naming convention to construct competency categories automatically and build the associations between the competency, the training, and the categories.

Another interesting piece is how I loaded the course descriptions. Within the spreadsheet, each course had a URL that linked out to a dedicated course description page. I used Hpricot to open the URL and parse out (or “screen scrape”) the HTML that I wanted, so it was all local to the applications DB.

The task takes quite a while to run (considering it has to parse a different web page for each of the 7,000 courses), but the application is better off for internalizing all dependencies. The course descriptions open in a FancyZoom window.

Clicking on the course title will open a new tab and go straight to the course page within NLA, bypassing the login. Seamless integration with NLA was built into the design.