EKADoctor — Catalog Update System
Delphi desktop app that converts Excel price lists into compact catalog update commands for a medical portal. Solved bulk updates for thousands of items.
Table of Contents
The Essence
Managers were uploading prices from Excel into the admin by hand — hours of work with errors. We needed an “accelerator” to digest thousands of rows and safely update the catalog.
Context of the Era
2007: shared hosting with 64 MB RAM, PHP 4/5, timeouts, no batch APIs. Doing heavy lifting on the client was common sense, not a hack.
Business Insights
- Shrinking an operation from hours to minutes saves real money.
- A thin client “ETL” offloads servers and reduces crash risk.
What I Built
- Native Windows app on Delphi that reads Excel via COM quickly.
- Conversion to compact server commands (instead of parsing heavy XLS on backend).
- Batched sending with a report: updated/added/errors.
Lessons
- Sometimes the best backend is a thin client.
- Don’t pull Excel to the server if you can avoid it.
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