The National Dairy Research Institute as country's premier Dairy Research Institution has developed considerable expertise over last five decades in different areas of Dairy Production, Processing, Management and Human Resource Development. Information generated at the Institute and services offered have contributed to the growth of the Dairy Industry as a whole and well being of millions of milk producer and consumers of milk and milk products. Realizing the challenging need of globalize Dairy Trade, the institute is continuously working to develop its R&D and HRD programs to better serve the nation in terms of food security.

University Student Record Management Software:
University Student Record Management Software (USRMS) was developed for the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, India. NDRI is Asia's second largest dairy institute and is recognized as a Deemed University. The application is used by students and teachers as well as the office staff for all activities related to the students.

The USRMS application maintains student details, starting with the registration of a student for a course offered by the institute. Admission is granted when the students clear the entrance test. The application tracks the students’ academic progress, hostel and other information as they complete their degree courses. Various criteria like attendance, financial dues clearance, projects and assignments submitted, and internal and external marks obtained are taken into consideration before the results are declared. All criteria and validations are built into the application, making for a paperless system.

When a student applies for registration to a particular course, the university office staff enters this data in the application. Students are allotted a roll number and are informed about the admission test. Students can view their result in detail by logging in. Successful candidates are required to deposit requisite fees along with the necessary documents (a soft copy of these documents is stored in the database). Roll number, course, faculty, hostel room, etc., are all allotted to the admitted students.

As the students go through the courses, the teachers enter records of their attendance, daily and weekly assignments, minor and major projects (or thesis in case of PhD) on a daily basis. Students may view their progress online. However, they are denied access to other students’ information.

Teachers are allowed to make changes in the data they enter for the next two days, after which only the department heads or the administrator can edit it. Teachers are not allowed to add, view, or edit data for a student or a subject they are not allocated.

The Project
The project took around two months to complete with two developers working on it. The requirements were not well defined and the university committee kept adding "wish list" items, so the first month was spent in developing and adapting the application to the changing requirements. Were it not for Iron Speed Designer, we would have aborted the project after the first two or three iterations. Both the Iron Speed Designer portion of the project and code customizations took one week each. Testing took another 15 to 20 days.

Code Extensions and Customizations
We developed some customizations for the application using AJAX and third-party controls like Telerik and Crystal Reports. The commonly used customizations include:

Add a Record to database
Ajax Based Messages
Store Session details
Filter the data grid according to logged in user