How a biotech company built a document management app integrated with Postgres

Ansun Biopharma is a late-stage clinical development company involved in creating first-in-class biologics to save the lives of vulnerable patient populations.

To simplify document processing within their company, Ansun Biopharma needed to create an internal tool allowing any employee to easily search into any document based on specific words, phrases, and other input data. They also were looking for a solution allowing them to build a complex web form for clinical trial sites around the globe that would be used to enter details about the patients being screened for inclusion in a medication trial.

To develop the suitable internal tools, Ansun Biopharma needed a flexible low-code environment supporting direct database connections (JDBC) and REST API calls. They were looking for a low-code tool that would take over most of the software engineering but would still allow for building fairly complex web apps at an affordable price. Since Ansun Biopharma focuses on scientific research versus spending money on software, they needed a solution that would fit a  tight budget while meeting their requirements. That’s why they turned to UI Bakery. 

With the use of UI Bakery, the company successfully implemented 2 projects.

Project #1. Document search

Ansun Biopharma created a sophisticated web app supporting full-text search and Google-style  search into a large document repository that included about a million research and regulatory documents accumulated over 20 years. The new app provided all the employees with a fast way to search into these documents based on various types of input data (words, phrases, locations, etc.).

Ansun Biopharma built a document processing automation system to shred the text out of PDF, DOC(x), XI(s), PPT(x), XML, MSG, store them in a novel Postgres database, and create a stored proc API on top of that.

Then, the web UI would call the stored procs, and display the results. Thanks to one of the recent UI Bakery enhancements, it’s also possible to display the original PDF file in a frame on a web page, so the user could see the original formatting and graphics that might have been embedded. 

Project #2. Web form

With UI Bakery, Ansun Biopharma created a complex web form for clinical trial sites around the globe. Site investigators would use this form to enter the details about patients being screened for inclusion in a medication trial. The form included 68 entry items: dates, text components, radio buttons, checkboxes, and list boxes. It required input validation and provided user feedback on entry errors. All the data was stored in the Postgres database.

Ansun Biopharma designed and built the security and authorization functionality into their web app. They needed it to allow admins to create sites within regions and countries, link these sites to specific users so that they could enter and review their data. 

Ansun Biopharma added all the complex logic they needed, for instance: dynamically filling list boxes from selections of other list boxes, changing colors based on user behavior, and supporting complex data operations from the web app UI. 

UI Bakery turned out to be a platform capable of delivering fully functional web apps quickly and without the need to learn web programming languages or build a web hosting stack. Once Ansun Biopharma understood the UI Bakery basics and fundamentals, the work went swimmingly: they managed to hone both web apps to perfection and create complex database logic by adding all the needed Actions and stored proc API calls seamlessly.

With UI Bakery, Ansun Biopharma got the following results:

• The entire web app development time decreased from several months of hand-coding to just a few weeks of low-code development.
• High level of web app responsiveness & very snappy load times for all the web app pages.
• Little to no training needed for each new web app user due to the app simplicity.
• Smooth performance of both web apps ensured due to the stability of UI Bakery.
• 2 projects implemented by only 1 database architect engineer with no frontend development skills.