Engineering Blog · Post #75

Real-Time Pipeline View: SSE-Powered Submissions and Renewals, One Queue

A submission moves from new to quoted. A rush comes in. Missing info lands in the inbox. Your pipeline changes every few minutes. InsightUW streams those changes — no refresh, no polling — so your workbench always reflects what's true right now.

The Problem

Most UW workstations are snapshots. You open the pipeline, you see Monday's state, you act on stale data. By the time you reload, a colleague has already taken the rush submission, or the broker has replied, or the SLA has breached. Pipeline management by F5 is how things slip.

The InsightUW Approach

InsightUW's workbench subscribes to a Server-Sent Events stream. The server holds a single async loop that fetches the full workbench snapshot, hashes it, and only emits when something changed. The browser keeps its view in sync automatically, with a heartbeat every 25 seconds to keep the connection alive.

graph LR subgraph Server["Backend (FastAPI)"] A["Every N seconds: query workbench + enrich BOR + enrich missing info + compute stage progress"] B["hash(payload) changed?"] C["emit snapshot event"] D["emit heartbeat every 25s"] end subgraph Browser["Angular UI"] E["Event Source /workbench/underwriting/stream"] F["Replace unified queue Rebuild Kanban / list Refresh SLA chips"] G["Live badge + last-updated tick"] end A --> B B -->|yes| C --> E --> F --> G B -->|no| D --> E

What You See

The dots are the stage stepper — received → clearance → triage → quoting → bound — derived from the timestamps already on the submission. When clearance completes elsewhere, that second dot fills in within five seconds on every open workbench.

Under the Hood

One SSE endpoint (/api/uw_workflow/workbench/underwriting/stream) streams the whole workbench — submissions + renewals + referrals, enriched with BOR status, missing-info counts, and stage progress.
Hashed diffs — the server only emits when the MD5 of the serialized payload actually changes, so a quiet minute costs nothing.
Auto-reconnect — browsers transparently reconnect through EventSource; the UI falls back to an OFFLINE chip if the connection drops.
No client polling — you don't pay the cache/round-trip cost of a 5-second refetch, and you don't hammer your own DB.

Example Flow

10:31 — Sarah opens the workbench. Sees 12 items, LIVE chip green.
10:32 — Broker replies on Ironclad; missing-info count drops from 3 to 1. Sarah's row updates without her touching anything.
10:35 — David assigns NovaPay from a different computer. Sarah's "Unassigned" column for NovaPay becomes "David Kim" instantly.
10:40 — Rush submission lands. Sarah's queue grows by one, the new row sorts to the top by urgency score.

What This Means for Underwriters

No stale pipeline — the workbench is always current, without refresh fatigue.
Visible teammates — see assignments and status changes as they happen.
Faster triage — new rushes surface in seconds, not on the next page load.
Cheap on infra — hashed diffs + heartbeats mean minimal chatter per open browser.

What's Next

Next: Multi-Dimension Pipeline Filters + Saved Views

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