Leave Management System in SharePoint 2013

Question

I am developing Leave Management System in SharePoint 2013. Employees can apply for leaves and Manager can either approve or reject it.

I have accomplished this by creating a new list - "Leaves" and starting a workflow when a new item gets added. Workflow sends an email to Manager and creates a task item for him to be able to approve or reject it.

1. However, I would like to know if this approach is preferable in real time scenario. Suppose for organization of 500 employees, can a single list hold so many records for all employees. What are possible ways here to utilize the features in SharePoint and also create a scalable application.

2. Also, I am also planning to develop a new Add-in in SharePoint 2013 since for applying new leave, we need to display additional information such as available leaves and do some custom validations which are not provided by default SharePoint list. I will be adding the new item to the SharePoint list from the custom developed page so that the workflow still is intact and I am still utilizing out-of-box SharePoint features. Is this the way to go for enterprise level application or there are any other alternatives. Please suggest.

Answer 1

SharePoint Lists are capable of holding that much data. I don't see a problem if you use a single list to hold leave request of 500 employees.

Assume a worst case scenario that all of the 500 employee apply 25 leaves individually in a year, then the item count would be (500*25= 12500) which is not bad.

You will need to take care of the List Threshold error, because data is greater than 5000. For this you can create views which always bring out results less than 5000.

Now lets say you have plan for 5 years, so each year you will add 12500 items which at the end of 5 years will be 12500*5 = 62500 items

Here you can think of 2 options

1. You can create a list for each year, i.e. Leaves2016, Leaves2017 etc.
2. In a single list create folders of year, and inside them add all leave datas.

Note: The only major thing you need to take care of List view threshold problem. Which can be tackled with intelligently designing views

For your second question.

I agree that the OOB SharePoint List form will not cater your requirements. So creating a custom page an add in or something else is a way to go. As far as your data is getting inserted into a list and eventually activating a workflow there is no harm in it.