[LINK] Delays with National Registration and Inquiry System

Tom Worthington tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Sat Jan 22 10:11:23 AEDT 2011


Delays are being reported with the National Registration and Inquiry
System due to high demand with the floods in Queensland and Victoria:
<https://emergency.redcross.org.au/>.

The system is provided by Emergency Management Australia and the Red
Cross to help people find family and friends in a disaster. The system
allows for registration and search for people via web forms. I noticed
some difficulties with the design of the web interface which might be
slowing the system down.

It is likely these problems are due to the interface the general public 
see being a cut down version of a more complex system used internally by 
emergency staff. But because many more people will use the public 
interface it needs to be optimised for efficiency:

    1. Encryption of home page: The site Hypertext Transfer Protocol
Secure (HTTPS) page for its home page
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Secure>.

This may slow down response time as the page content has to be
encrypted. There is no need to encrypt the home page as it contains no
sensitive information. Encryption may also prevent the caching of page
content. The home page should be changed from HTTPS to HTTP.

    2. Encryption of Images: The Australian and Red Cross logos on the
top of each page use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).

---
img src="../../images/EMA%20Logo.jpg" alt="Attorney Generals Department"...
img src="../../images/RedCross_PowerOfHumanity.gif" alt="Red Cross" ...
---

As with the home page, there is no need to encrypt these images.

    3. Not Selecting Emergency First: Registration and search facilities
are provided separately for each emergency. Thus the user has to select
which emergency (Queensland or Victoria) first and then if they want to
register or search. However, the interface presents tabs for register
and search prominently on the top of the screen before requesting the
emergency further down. As a result it is likely many people will select
register or search without having selected an emergency first and then
either get no response or be presented with an error message. The 
interface should be changed to first ask the for the emergency and only 
then offer the choice of register or search.

    4. Use of ViewState: Microsoft ASP.NET "View State" is used to
communicate information between the on screen form and the database
application <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET#View_state>.

---
input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" 
value="/wEPDwULLTEzODc3MD ...
---

While this can be used to create sophisticated interfaces, it does add a
considerable overhead. It is not needed for simple interfaces. As an
example, all of the options in the search forms (such as the names of
all the countries of the world and the list of all the forms of street
name), are being duplicated in the ViewState field (encoded as a base64
string) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64>.
This doubles the size of the search form file. View state should be
disabled for these controls.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra




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