Traditionally, the Charter School for whom this system was made had external software that ran the actual lottery. It was a cumbersome process where we would need to export the registrant data into an excel format, then import it into this desktop software, the lottery was randomized and run on the desktop and a file exported with results. Then we would need to re-import the data and run SQL co0mmands to match the results to the students application.
This year, we wrote the lottery so that it runs on the actual registrant data. There are some rules about acceptance (such as if one multiple gets accepted, the other(s) do too. Anyway, the system runs in about 1 minute and the results are immediately available.
