Currently when court attendees all need to look at a particular document they all have to sift through a pile of paper documents to find the correct one. These piles can become out of order and differences in printing may mean that page 443 for one person is page 444 for another which can lead to confusion and waste time.
This project is looking to digitise this process using the existing HMCTS Document Management Store and Document Viewer.
A primary user can choose a document and initiate a new in court presentation session. This will generate a URL for the session that can be shared out to other users in the court room. Users can then log in and join the session. Any changes to the primary user's view of the document such as page changes are then shared out to all users in the session.
Currently the In Court Presentation project is in concept. This is a prototype front end built to show stakeholders the basic flow and get to grips with new technical challenges. As such it does not reflect the final project and does not include some fairly important like a database and load balancing. The Github repository for the In Court Presentation front end prototype can be found at https://github.com/hmcts/rpa-in-court-presentation-web.
This project uses Spring Boot 2 and allows communication from the front end via REST and Websockets. We're using STOMP for pub/sub - so when the presenter changes document or page it publishes an event to the websocket that is then sent down to all subscribers for that hearing session.
- Message Queue for a pub/sub broker between instances when load balanced.
- An actual database to hold hearing data and lists of current participants.
- Websocket connection seems a bit flaky on CNP. Need to work out why.
- Websockets Vs short polling?