Portfolio: Research Pricing Tool

research.unsw.edu.au

Symfony2 custom app development / Drupal integration.

Research Pricing Tool

The Research Pricing Tool allows researchers at UNSW to calculate the budget for a given project. The UNSW Grants Management Office decided to rebuild the tool that they had previously developed, which consisted of a collection of custom PHP scripts, and which depended upon an ageing FileMaker database back-end. In my capacity as a full-time contractor at UNSW, I was the lead developer on this project.

The new tool is built in Silex (a Symfony2 distribution). It allows for the entry of basic project information, of a project's internal and external personnel needs, and of a project's non-personnel costs. It also stores various items of data used in budget calculation, including UNSW annual salary rates, salary on-cost rates, and indirect cost rates (all editable via an administration interface). For a given project, it calculates the project's total budget, and it allows the project's budget data to be exported as an Excel spreadsheet (using PHPExcel).

The tool is integrated into the UNSW Research Gateway, via a Silex-Drupal integration system that I developed. So, the tool's pages are rendered via Drupal, and access is restricted to UNSW staff via the Research Gateway's Drupal-based authentication.