Dynamic Form Builder
ReactFlow enables administrators to design structured forms with conditional logic, reusable components, dynamically generated schemas, and stable internal identifiers for reliable downstream reporting.
Unified SaaS Platform for K-12 Education
A multi-tenant K-12 SaaS platform combining identity management, configurable forms, visual workflows, SIS synchronization, payments, reporting, tasks, audit trails, and granular authorization for large-scale school and district operations.
Project Overview
The solution is enterprise-grade K-12 education software designed to replace fragmented administrative systems with one scalable district platform. It centralizes student, parent, staff, identity, forms, workflows, reporting, payments, and operational processes while synchronizing data with external Student Information Systems. The architecture supports approximately 460,000 students and parents plus 7,000 staff, combining microservices, durable workflow orchestration, fine-grained authorization, flexible JSONB schemas, and immutable auditing to support complex multi-tenant school operations without sacrificing security or traceability.
Business Challenges We Addressed
Fragile SIS Synchronization
Legacy batch synchronization with systems such as PowerSchool offered limited diagnostics, making failures difficult to identify while excessive requests risked third-party API rate limiting.
Complex Education Permissions
Districts required authorization across divisions, schools, groups, staff, students, and parents while individual users could hold different relationships and permissions across several educational contexts.
Live Form Versioning
Changing active registration and operational forms could disrupt submissions already in progress, creating schema drift and potential inconsistencies in stored education records.
Ambiguous Reporting Fields
Reusable frontend labels produced duplicate database column meanings, making filters and reports harder to interpret when several fields used identical human-readable names.
Data Residency and Auditability
Canadian data-residency requirements and Alberta FOIP expectations required immutable evidence covering access grants, file views, workflow transitions, administrative activity, and system changes.
Scalable District Automation
The platform required education workflow automation that could coordinate forms, approvals, integrations, tasks, payments, reporting, and user relationships across very large educational populations.
How We Architected the Solution
Ditstek built an education management platform around fine-grained authorization, durable integration workflows, immutable form versions, centralized auditing, configurable process automation, and scalable data structures for complex district operations.
Decoupled Identity and Authorization
Keycloak manages authentication and Single Sign-On while OpenFGA evaluates relationship-based permissions independently, supporting complex school and family relationships without oversized access tokens.
Durable SIS Integration
Temporal Cloud orchestrates synchronization and writeback workflows with retries, exponential backoff, and timeouts, creating resilient student information system integration with external education systems.
Extensible Integration Contracts
Generic synchronization and writeback interfaces separate business workflows from individual SIS vendors, creating a foundation for PowerSchool and additional providers.
Immutable Form Versioning
Breaking form changes create new snapshots while existing submissions remain bound to their original schema, protecting in-progress records from disruptive configuration changes.
Stable Reporting Metadata
Hidden Internal Labels create unique database identifiers while frontend designers remain free to use friendly field names appropriate to school administrators and users.
Centralized Immutable Auditing
ClickHouse and a shared audit SDK record tenant-scoped events across services, users, integrations, and updates in an append-only structure supporting compliance analysis.
Core Platform Capabilities
The platform brings configurable forms, visual automation, identity administration, SIS synchronization, audit analysis, dashboards, payments, tasks, and academic administration into one scalable educational operations environment.
Visual Workflow Engine
Non-technical staff can configure statuses, transitions, conditions, timers, escalations, tasks, and automated actions through a visual workflow model similar to familiar project-management interfaces.
Centralized Administration
Tenant identity, nested schools, users, groups, student portability, and global settings are managed centrally while identity data synchronizes with Keycloak and OpenFGA.
SIS Synchronization Services
Temporal workflows ingest external identity information and write approved lifecycle changes back to SIS platforms while controlling retries, timeouts, and enabled synchronization categories.
Audit Query and Viewer
Authorized administrators can investigate compliance events, filter activity with VQL, export data, and inspect detailed before-and-after values for recorded system changes.
Dashboards and Saved Filters
Custom views can use VQL or OData queries to populate real-time charts and tables over large submission datasets using optimized PostgreSQL indexing.
Integrated Task Inbox
Assigned workflow steps appear within a centralized task interface supporting confirmations, decision routing, approvals, and configurable multi-approver thresholds.
Secure Payment Workflows
Stripe, Moneris, and PayPal integrations support billing items, submission-level payments, transaction logging, refunds, and education-related catalogue purchases.
Academic and Administrative Operations
Field-trip management, attendance controls, grading scales, exams, audited overrides, risk information, venues, maps, and restricted report-card exports extend core platform operations.
Tech Implementation
- React.js
- Next.js
- ReactFlow
- New Relic
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Serilog
- Google Pub/Sub
- PayPal
- Moneris
- Stripe
- PowerSchool
- ArgoCD
- GKE
- Terraform
- GitLab CI
- Docker
- Temporal Cloud
- Apache APISIX
- OpenFGA
- Keycloak
- Keycloakify
- GCP Bucket
- Npgsql
- Entity Framework Core
- Google Cloud SQL
- ClickHouse
- PostgreSQL
- Wolverine
- FluentValidation
- MediatR
- ASP.NET Core 9
- .NET 9
- Yup
Measurable Business Impact
Large-Scale Education Foundation
The architecture is designed to support approximately 460,000 students and parents alongside 7,000 staff across complex nested school and district structures.
High-Volume Form Processing
PostgreSQL indexing strategies support fast reporting and querying over millions of form submissions without requiring materialized views for every reporting scenario.
Low-Latency Authorization
OpenFGA and in-memory caching achieved typical authorization resolution below ten milliseconds while preserving fine-grained relationship-based security.
Complex Visual Workflows
The workflow designer can smoothly render and interact with complex process graphs containing more than 1,000 nodes and 2,000 edges.
Resilient District Synchronization
Legacy opaque batch scripts were replaced with durable integration workflows offering automatic retry behavior, execution visibility, and stronger auditability across external synchronization.
Traceable Administrative Operations
Immutable audits, durable workflows, permission checks, and centralized integration patterns give districts stronger visibility into how critical records and processes move through the K-12 SaaS platform.