The project brief was to enable electronic automated requests for legal documents (OC1, OS1 and K16) to the Land Registry.
Findings
The Land Registry implemented a tiered approach to webservice access, with service providers accessing the Land Registry system and offering access through their own systems. We selected
Searchflow as our provider partner as they provided a SOAP webservice request interface.
The most challenging part was to get the case management system, Solcase, to enqueue requests to Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Solcase is based on the Progress database and 4GL (see
www.progress.com) and supplied by LexisNexis VisualFiles (
www.visualfiles.com). We used the custom scripting language in Solcase to write SQL stored procedure calls to text files, and then used its "OsCommand" facility to run the CScript windows scripting host which then runs a Javascript file which in turn uses COM ADO to run the SQL against the server. This architecture allows the system to run on all users' workstations with no software installation being required .
Once requests are received by SQL Server, a service written in C# and Visual Studio 2005 polls the database regularly and merges the enqueued data into an XML template prior to calling the Searchflow webservice . The status of the request progresses in a state-machine type workflow and waits for the response from Searchflow.
Searchflow sends requests to the Land Registry and returns the results as a PDF file attached to an email. We use C# and an open-source .NET library code to collect these mails from a POP3-enabled account on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and to extract the PDF attachment and save it back to SQL Server.
Further Solcase custom script polls the SQL database using the same mechanism and imports the results and PDF documents for each case and then queues the case for attention by a user.
The resulting system provides improved process scalability for Fasttrac Solicitors and enables them to process remortgage cases faster and with less effort.