The Clean Transportation Branch within the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation instructed the build of the ITVR application. The instruction was to build an online portal to allow the public to apply for pre-approval, based on their income level, to receive a provincial rebate on the purchase of a new zero-emission vehicle. The application was launched to the public in August 2022.
The provincial program providing rebates has been running for several years and was open to anyone regardless of income. Changes to means-test the program created the need for a pre-approval process where applicants identities are verified, and their incomes checked with Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).
The program is managed by a government appointed delivery agent, the New Car Dealers Association (NCDA). They are responsible for working with car dealerships to provide the actual vehicle rebates to the public.
The ITVR application consists of these main elements:
- Online public application form, accessed using BCeID or Services Card app
- Internal console for government to search, review and process applications
- Ability to send/receive applicant data with CRA to check incomes (using FTP)
- Ability to send/receive income approved applicant data with NCDA (using API)
- Automated email functionality to provide applicants with information on their application
ITVR system statuses and workflow can be found documented in the flowchart
All services are setup to run via docker. To start everything up you can run in the project folder:
docker-compose up --build
This will start up a postgres database, a Django web app, a React frontend app, a Spring REST service, and a MinIO service with a private bucket itvr
Add this entry to your /etc/hosts
file:
127.0.0.1 minio
Django offers many helpful mangement commands out of the box. To be able to use these with docker you can access the python environment with bash:
docker-compose exec api bash
To create a Django admin user try running this command in the shell:
python manage.py createsuperuser
The admin panel is available here: http://localhost:8000/admin/
You can view Django Restframework's browseable api here: http://localhost:8000/api/
Use a created superuser to login and view the api.
To get into postgres in terminal docker-compose exec db psql -U postgres itvr
You can view the contents of the bucket in MinIO by visiting http://localhost:9001/login
. Use env variables MINIO_ROOT_USER
and MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD
to login to the console. Default values are found in minio.env
We take advantage that MinIO is S3 compatible and use django-storages S3 backend for media files.
We are using a shared realm Keycloak client. Shared realm clients can be accessed and configured via Common Hosted Single Sign-on (CSS)
Once added as a team member to existing projects (this project is called itvr
), you can configure the redirect urls for each environment (dev, test, prod). Installation json is available as well as some helpful documentation about integrating the client.
We are using CHES to send email. Documentation is available here
To get access to the created client, go request account with application acronym ITVR
. This will allow you to reset client secrets for environments (dev, test, prod) as needed.
Submitting wage requests can be done manually by logging into ftp://ftp-ot.cra-arc.gc.ca/pub/BC/iv/bcvr/ anonymously and dropping any encrypted files in the uaclient2cra folder. Within a short time the encrypted response will be available within the uacra2client folder. All security is trusted within the encryption algorithm. Anybody can download a file from here. Only the target user/computer can decrypt the file.
For the next valid sequence number:
If you ever are not sure, Susan can verify with ITB or send a request with the last sequence you are aware of and it will will fail but you will get an email notification indicating the error and what the next available sequence is.
Example of the contents of the error email for wrong sequence number:
THE FOLLOWING FILENAME IS EXCLUDED FROM PROCESSING PLEASE INVESTIGATE THE FILE LISTED BELOW: INPUT FILENAME: DEMO.A00154 REASON : INVALID SEQUENCE NUMBER ON INPUT FILENAME
THE NEXT VALID SEQUENCE NUMBER TO USE IS : 00155
This is a service that uses Entrust's Java toolkit to encrypt/decrypt files.
The frontend is built using Create React App.
The app is available by default at http://localhost:3000/
We use Openshift to deploy our applications. Access the console here
There's training on Openshift offered by BCDevExchange. Check the schedule here
We use git for version control. Each developer has their own fork of the repo and works off of branches from there If another branch is merged in (eg from another developer) then the branch in progress will need to be rebased before it gets merged in.
Steps: git checkout release-branch git fetch upstream git pull --rebase upstream release-branch git checkout featurebranch git rebase release-branch
If there are any conflicts, you will have to step through each commit and fix them. After conflicts are fixed and added (git add) then:
git rebase --continue
until all of the conflicts are fixed.
If you already have a branch at origin you'll have to force push, otherwise doing a regular push will just give errors: git push -f origin
backend tests will be recognized and run with other tests if they have follow this naming convention: test_[name].py eg. test_calculate_rebate.py
to run tests use a terminal in the api container and type python manage.py test
or to run specific test files, point to the folder or file python manage.py test api.services.tests.test_calculate_rebate
Currently, when the task-queue application starts, it creates scheduled jobs only if those jobs don't already exist in the database. This means that if some aspects of a job are changed (e.g. its arguments concerning timeout time, etc), one has to delete the job first in the admin console before deploying, or update the job manually in the admin console after deploying.
This is a list that was created on 2023-02-01 with all Zelda Devs to provide alternative work instead of bringing in a new ticket.
*Team Rule Do not bring in ticket After Friday
-
Help another Dev - see if other Devs need help to finish their ticket
-
PR Reviews – linked to the task above
-
Writing additional tests – for both tront and back end
-
Take a look at Tech Debt tickets - If we bring in tickets let's bring in Tech Debt first
-
Learning time:
-
Take the opportunity to familiarize yourself with business logic, tech (anything around work we do)
-
New learning and applying it to our work
-
Innovation work