Overview

HMPPS Creating Future Opportunities (CFO) utilise the Case Assessment and Tracking System (CATS) to support delivery of CFO Evolution . The programme utilises external funding to perform rehabilitative services with offenders in custody and the community. Approx. 600 users from non-government organisations use CATS to record work performed with offenders creating an evidence base that supports performance management, payments to providers, ongoing research and audits from external bodies.

Interfaces/Systems (Backend interface for surfacing the data to the front end)

• .NET 10
• ASP.NET Core

Mechanism (How does it communicate with other systems? Frequency of data pull/push, reporting, events etc)

CATS relies on the external data from Nomis and Delius. This is aggregated and managed by the CFO Data Management System.

Technology (What's the technology that drives the product? i.e. Azure, java script etc)

• ASP.NET Core (Blazor)
• C#
• LINQ
• Entity Framework (runtime ORM)
• SQL Project (database schema management)
• SQL Server
• HTML, CSS, Javascript
• Dotnet Aspire

No. of users

600 (approx. 100 concurrent)

Development Environment

This has been developed on Windows 11 using Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider

Development Setup and Execution Guide

Prerequisites

• .NET 10 SDK
• Visual Studio Code users:
  • C# Dev Kit Extension
  • Aspire Extension (& CLI)

Running the apps

The recommended way to run and debug these apps is using .NET Aspire.

• Using Visual Studio Code: open the project and press F5, selecting the Default Configuration.
• Using Visual Studio or other IDEs: From the debug configuration dropdown, select Cats.AppHost and start the application.

On startup, Aspire automatically applies the SQL Project schema to the local SQL Server container before starting the application. The DatabaseSeeding project then runs to seed any required reference data. No manual migration steps are needed for local development.

Database schema

The database schema is managed via a SQL Project at src/Database/CatsDb/CatsDb.sqlproj (using the Microsoft.Build.Sql SDK). Schema is defined as .sql files organised by SQL schema (e.g. Activities/, Enrolment/, Identity/).

When running locally via Aspire, the CatsSqlProj resource deploys the SQL Project to the local SQL Server container automatically. EF Core is used as the runtime ORM only — it no longer manages migrations.

Note: The SQL Project deployment is skipped when publishing to Kubernetes (WithSkipWhenDeployed()). The schema must be applied to the target database separately before deploying a new release.

Build automation with Cake

This repository includes a file-based Cake script at cake.cs. Run it from the repository root with:

dotnet cake.cs

By default this runs the Publish target with the Release configuration. The full target chain is:

Clean -> Restore -> Build -> Test -> Publish

You can run a specific target or change the configuration by passing arguments to the script:

# Build without publishing
dotnet cake.cs --target=Build

# Run tests
dotnet cake.cs --target=Test

# Publish using Debug configuration
dotnet cake.cs --target=Publish --configuration=Debug

Available targets:

• Clean
• Restore
• Build
• Test
• Publish

The Publish target writes output to:

• artifacts/Server.UI
• artifacts/DatabaseSeeding
• artifacts/CatsDb.dacpac

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Publishing (preview)

This repository uses Aspire for service composition (dependency injection, service discovery, and configuration management).

Aspire is also used to provide a Kubernetes publishing workflow that is currently in preview: container image build & push, and generation/packaging of Kubernetes manifests & Helm charts.

Prerequisites

• Docker (for image builds)
• Access to a container registry (credentials configured)
• kubectl and a valid kubeconfig with cluster access
• Helm (for chart-based deployments)

Build and publish image

IMAGE_NAME=hmpps-cfo/cats
TAG=latest
REGISTRY=registry.mycorp.com:1234

# Locally
dotnet publish src/Server.UI/Server.UI.csproj \
    --configuration Release \
    --os linux \
    --arch x64 \
    --target:PublishContainer \
    --property:ContainerRepository=$IMAGE_NAME \
    --property:ContainerImageTag=$TAG

# or to a remote registry (with the ContainerRegistry property)
dotnet publish src/Server.UI/Server.UI.csproj \
    --configuration Release \
    --os linux \
    --arch x64 \
    --target:PublishContainer \
    --property:ContainerRegistry=$REGISTRY \
    --property:ContainerRepository=$IMAGE_NAME \
    --property:ContainerImageTag=$TAG

Generate Kubernetes manifests & Helm charts

dotnet aspire publish -o aspire-output

Deploy (using Helm upgrade)

helm upgrade --install aspire ./aspire-output --namespace default \
    --set parameters.cats.cats_image=$IMAGE