[ANN] New Goodie - EditableListView

I have recently replaced a client's MS Access system with a new Dolphin
application. Part of the brief was to maintain the same look and feel; since the
existing system made use of the Access datasheet (editable grid) control, it was
necessary to implement a similar control in Dolphin.

I have now tidied up the implementation and released the control as a goodie.
More details and the download are available here:

http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/widgets

Hope you find it useful.

Best regards,

John Aspinall
Solutions Software

Hi John,

This is fantastic!  Thank you so much for making it available.  The
long-sought-after editable grid/listview/whathaveyou, now a Dolphin widget.
Waaaay cool.  I've run the demo, looked a little at the code, and look
forward to incorporating it in my own apps.

-- Louis

John Aspinall wrote:

> I have now tidied up the implementation and released the control as a
> goodie. More details and the download are available here:
>
> http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/widgets
>
> Hope you find it useful.

Very nice indeed; thank you!


BTW, it appears from a *quick* look that it'd quite easy to create an editable
list tree view as an amalgam of this and my own ListTreeView -- would anyone be
interested ?

    -- chris


Screenshot of editable list tree *apparently* working OK:
    http://ephemera.metagnostic.org/screenshots/EditableListTreeViewExample.png


ListTreeView itself of is at:
    http://www.metagnostic.org/DolphinSmalltalk/ListTree.html

John,

It looks great.  The license agreement gives me one concern: would including
it in system make me unable to charge for source for the entire system?
This would not be a case of dropping your work into my set of development
tools and charging for it; I can well understand your desire to protect
against that.

Have a good one,

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]

"John Aspinall" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:5ITeb.6669$[hidden email]...
> I have recently replaced a client's MS Access system with a new Dolphin
> application. Part of the brief was to maintain the same look and feel;
since the
> existing system made use of the Access datasheet (editable grid) control,
it was
> necessary to implement a similar control in Dolphin.

Thanks John, this looks very cool.  It looks like a very clean and well
designed implementation.  I had been dabbling with this concept for a while,
but my code never got past the experimental stage and always had rough
edges.  Your solution looks like it fits well with the style Dolphin.  Great
job!

I will be using this tool with ReStore to replace an Access application as
well.  With these tools the only complication left is reporting.  I have not
decided between Excel and RTF yet, actually I may consider PDF as well.  I
have fantasies about creating an WYSIWYG Object Reporting Framework for
Dolphin, I am just not sure if it is time effective to do that at the moment
though.

If you don't mind me asking how are you handling your reporting needs as you
move away from Access?

Chris

Christopher,

> If you don't mind me asking how are you handling your reporting needs as you
> move away from Access?

Recently it's been Crystal Reports, although I only came to this because the
client was already using it. It's probably worth pointing out that my
perspective is a little skewed since the majority of the time I'm working with
relational data, and so any reporting solution that works from a RDB is OK.

For another project I came up with a solution using the Access report system
driven from Dolphin. This was a little hack-y but worked reasonably well.

I'd really like to do simple Access-style reports directly within Dolphin,
although I spent much more time on the EditableListView than I originally
intended, so I won't be developing my own solution in the near future ;o)
I experimented briefly with some code to turn a Dolphin View resource into a
printable form (so it would be possible to use the View Composer as a report
creator) but I'm not sure whether it would ever be flexible enough.

Best regards,

John Aspinall
Solutions Software

Bill,

> The license agreement gives me one concern: would including
> it in system make me unable to charge for source for the entire system?
> This would not be a case of dropping your work into my set of development
> tools and charging for it; I can well understand your desire to protect
> against that.

This is the first goodie I've releases so apologies if the license agreement
isn't perfect; hopefully the intention is clear even if the wording isn't.

Basically if you have any concerns over the agreement, let me know and I'm sure
I can OK whatever it is you want to do. Even better, if someone can point me
towards the text of an agreement that expresses the general principle behind a
goodie, then I'd be happy to use that instead.

Best regards,

John Aspinall
Solutions Software

Chris,

> BTW, it appears from a *quick* look that it'd quite easy to create an
> editable list tree view as an amalgam of this and my own ListTreeView --
> would anyone be interested ?

*Definitely* - I can think of somewhere to use it right now!

Best regards,

John Aspinall
Solutions Software

John Aspinall wrote:
>
> *Definitely* - I can think of somewhere to use it right now!

I've replied off-line.

    -- chris

Hi John,

If you don't mind me asking, do you point Crystal Reports directly at
the raw database tables, or do you use some other method, maybe
generating some sort of model or schema for Crystal Reports from
ReStore?

Thanks,

Jerry Bell


"John Aspinall" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
>
> Recently it's been Crystal Reports, although I only came to this because the
> client was already using it. It's probably worth pointing out that my
> perspective is a little skewed since the majority of the time I'm working with
> relational data, and so any reporting solution that works from a RDB is OK.
>

Jerry,

> If you don't mind me asking, do you point Crystal Reports directly at
> the raw database tables, or do you use some other method, maybe
> generating some sort of model or schema for Crystal Reports from
> ReStore?

The former. The database structure isn't too complex and the reports aren't too
demanding.

To support the latter way of working, perhaps it would be nice if ReStore had an
easy way to create flattened records directly in the database. Maybe something
like:

(reStore instancesOf: Order) collectInDB:
    [ :order |
    FlattenedOrder new
        customerName: order customer name;
        customerPostcode: order customer address postcode;
        itemName: order orderedItem name;
        yourself]


Best regards,

John Aspinall
Solutions Software