This is a series of applications and services that collectively help automate form filling for an immigration lawyer. From a bird’s-eye-view, the system allows the client to securely answer questions and upload supporting documentation so a back-end server can fill out the draft immigration forms for the lawyer to review.
This is a series of applications and services that collectively help automate form filling for an immigration lawyer. From a bird’s-eye-view, the system allows the client to securely answer questions and upload supporting documentation so a back-end server can fill out the draft immigration forms for the lawyer to review.
The system utilizes a custom WordPress plugin, which communicates with a custom Google AppEngine app. Since this is a lawyer and all of the information is very confidential, the system utilizes encryption and layers of defense to prevent and limit any potential data breaches. Information and documents are stored using asymmetric encryption until they need to be accessed by the client or the lawyer.
Government forms are constantly changing, so we first built a system a match online form fields to government PDF fields. These pairings can be updated as the forms change over time. Government forms also require their fields to be filled out in specific ways. So, for example, a social security number must be split into individual digits on the PDF. And dates have to be split into day, month, and year on the PDF. The system automatically knows how to perform many of these data transformations.
For more complicated situations, we created a custom scripting system that the lawyer can use. These scripts enable date calculations (ex: today + 90 days), removing pages of the form based on user input (ex: removing spouse pages if the client is single), and so much more. The system was built to enable new scripts to be added easily over time.
We created a custom Google AppEngine application to handle the actual form filling and attaching client supporting documentation. This process takes a minute or two for each client, so it made sense to offload it to a separate process rather than bringing the web server to a halt every time a client wanted to fill out their forms. The app uses a REST-ful API to start a merge and also to send notifications about any missing information or errors. The Cloud infrastructure can scale up and down as needed based on the number of simultaneous merge requests at a given moment.
Since this is a business-critical app working with highly-sensitive information, it has to work! We built a unit testing framework to systematically work through different scenarios, testing the resulting filled PDF against expectations. There are testing frameworks for the WordPress plugin as well as the Cloud app. Updates to either system must pass the unit tests before being committed to production servers.
