Reply To: READ ME
I think what would be most useful would be to break the data down by week (and maybe also by month — if there aren’t enough submissions entered for a given single date, the results won’t be particularly useful), and show the kind of information that Whiskers suggested:
* Show a pie graph that details the status of submissions with checks cashed in the given time frame (being able to combine data from multiple weeks might be nice, but I’m not sure how useful it would be).
* Have the option to show the breakdown of the items (i.e. 4 MG, 35 SBR, 3 SBS, etc.).
* Show generalized time to approval (maybe a bar graph?) for the date range selected “X approved after N days, Y approved after N+1 days, Z approved after N+2 days, etc.) — and have the option to break it down by type of Title II firearm.
Additionally, if you’re going to break data down by week, Sunday to Saturday probably makes the most sense — Plenty of applications get submitted or approved on Sundays, but USPS doesn’t run on Sunday, so they won’t get mailed until Monday or later, and eforms come back immediately.
Breaking it up by week (and maybe by months too) would also mean that you could set the backend to generate the data on a schedule, or based around load, so that they weren’t being constantly recomputed every time someone opened the page — just set it to generate the graphs based on the data in the main DB, and then store the results until the next scheduled update. While this would result in data that is slightly less fresh, minimizing server load is probably more important: If we’re already waiting 8 months for paperwork, data that’s 6-24 hours old should be more than sufficient to know whether or not we should be expecting an approval anytime soon.
