Code On Time: Reports

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Thursday, November 27, 2008Print Subscribe

It seems that RSS feeds are everywhere. You find them on your computer desktop, in your favorite web browser bookmarks, email readers. Links to RSS feeds are sprinkled all over the web. Your cell phone and TV are likely able to show RSS feeds as well.

RSS feed can free your inbox from being flooded by various email notifications about events of interest that you might have subscribed to. Email notifications are "pushed" to your inbox by servers that host the data. RSS feeds are "pulled" from the servers by RSS reader applications on-demand. You control your RSS subscriptions by configuring the frequency of delivery, the number of items in a feed, and the size of the archive.

Data Aquarium Framework now supports View RSS Feed command option in all data views that have an action bar. Here is how the action group must be defined in a data controller descriptor file.

<actionGroup scope="ActionBar" headerText="Actions">
  <action commandName="ExportCsv" headerText="Export to Spreadsheet" 
        description="Analyze items with spreadsheet&lt;br/&gt; application." />
  <action commandName="ExportRss" headerText="View RSS Feed" 
        description="Syndicate items with an RSS reader." />
  <action />
  <action commandName="Custom" commandArgument="MyCommand" 
        headerText="My Command" description="Execute my custom command" />
</actionGroup>

Navigate to http://dev.codeontime.com/demo/nwblob and select Orders in the drop down in the top left corner of the page. Sort orders in descending order of order date and limit orders to those shipped via Federal Shipping.

Your screen will like the one below.

Select Actions|View RSS Feed option on action bar above the grid view.

An RSS feed will be displayed. Here is how the RSS feed looks when displayed in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0.

You can see this feed live at http://dev.codeontime.com/demo/NWBlob/Export.ashx?q=PHEgYz0iT3JkZXJzIiB2PSJncmlkMSIgcz0iT3JkZXJEYXRlIGRlc2MiIGU9IkV4cG9ydFJzcyI%2bPGY%2bU2hpcFZpYUNvbXBhbnlOYW1lOj1GZWRlcmFsIFNoaXBwaW5nPC9mPjwvcT4%3d.

The link looks cryptic for a reason. Parameter q in the URL specifies unique encoded query to retrieve an RSS feed from our hosted demo application and instructs the server to sort orders in descending order by order date and filter ship via field by Federal Shipping.

Click on link Great Lakes Food Market to see the details of the order on a standard details page automatically generated as a part of your ASP.NET application by our code generator, Code OnTime Generator. You can edit order details and return back to the feed by clicking on Close button.

Feed viewer capabilities depend on your web browser. Here is how the feed of employees is presented in Apple Safari.

Typically you can search the feed content and sort data in various ways. If there is a least on date field in your data view then the item publication date is defaulted to this field.

The real value of RSS will reveal itself when you subscribe to a feed.

For example, subscribe to the orders feed referenced above in Internet Explorer. If you are using Vista as operating system then it is likely displaying a side bar with various gadgets. Add Feed Headlines gadget to the side bar if you don't already have one. Configure the gadget to read the orders feed.

A list of order customer names will be displayed in the gadget.

If you select a customer name then order details are immediately displayed next to the gadget. If you click on a customer name then details of order will be presented. If you click on Orders|Orders link then a complete live RSS feed is displayed. The gadget will automatically scroll the list.

Add a new order to the database. Next automatic "pull" of RSS feed will show you a new order right on your desktop without any need to sign into a web application or sending an e-mail notification from the server.

This may work great in various scenarios. Your information workers can create an unlimited number of data feeds by filtering and ordering any application data to their liking and viewing and subscribing to RSS feeds created based on the current data view that they see. New data that falls under the same filtering and sorting conditions will show up when the feeds are updated.

There are numerous RSS feed readers out there. Popular Email applications will also display RSS feeds and tell users when new feed items are available, which can make your business data more tightly integrated in everyday business processes.

Our powerful ASP.NET code generator, Code OnTime Generator, will instantly create robust AJAX applications based on Data Aquarium Framework. See a complete list of features of the framework at http://codeontime.com/productsae.aspx.

Labels: AJAX, ASP.NET 3.5, Data Aquarium Framework, Reports, User Interface

Friday, October 31, 2008Print Subscribe

Export to Spreadsheet

Data Aquarium Framework applications are now supporting automatic exporting in Comma-Separated Values format.

Apply filters and sort your grid views the way you like. Select Actions on action bar and choose Export to Spreadsheet option.

A data file will be created on the server and a new web browser window will be launched to download the result. Your spreadsheet processor will automatically launch and displayed data.

The sort order, custom filters, and data formatting will be displayed similar to what you see in a grid view.

This feature is automatically available to all premium project subscribers.

Labels: AJAX, Data Aquarium Framework, Reports, User Interface

Saturday, July 26, 2008Print Subscribe

GUI of Web Form Builder Applications

Here we will show many of the available features of an application generated with Web Form Builder code generator project.

Sorting

On the left side of the screen, you can see all the database objects discovered in your database. Clicking on an item will bring you to a list of records contained in the table. At the bottom of the list, you can page through the records by clicking on a page number. Sorting is done by clicking on the column header you wish to sort by. First click sorts in ascending order, and second click sorts in descending order. Sorting and paging are executed via client callbacks, eliminating the need for post backs, and speeding up your application.

Filtering

To create a filter, press Filter, which is located directly above the record list. A drop down and text field will appear. Select which field you wish to filter from the drop down, type in the filter criteria, and press Apply. The records will filter by your selection. Any partial or full filter will work. To remove your filter, press Cancel.

You can also use a comma to apply multiple filters, and comparison operators to further specify your filter. After applying a filter, you can still sort and page. If you choose to visit another page and return, the filter will remain, saving a lot of time. If you cancel your filter, but want to reapply it, the most recent filter will be remembered when you press Filter again.

Detail View

If you click on the first field of a record, you will be sent to the detail view of the record. All the information about the record is displayed here, as well as all the related child records. On the detail record lists, filtering and sorting is still available to you. You can edit the record by pressing Edit, delete by pressing Delete, and create a new record by pressing New.

Editing Records

When you press Edit, the form switches into editing mode. Here, you can change many of the fields. Lookup values are represented as drop down controls. Read-only lookup fields are automatically inferred from your database and correspond to the editable lookup fields of your record. When you finish editing, press Update to save all changes, or press Cancel to go back without saving. You can also click on any of the objects on the left to go straight to their respective record lists without changing.

If you try to delete certain records which causes database constraint violation, the command will be canceled and an error message will appear. This can occur because the record can have associated child records, as in the example below.

Creating New Records

To create a new record, first go to the database object in which you would like to have the new record in. Press the link where it says "Click here to create a new record." The new record screen will appear, and now you can add values to all the editable fields, and set values to lookup fields with drop down controls. Press Insert to create your new record, or Cancel to go back to the previous screen without saving. Notice that when fields with database constraints are incorrectly entered, an error message will appear.

Generating Reports

The second option above the records list allows you to generate reports of the current database object. Pressing PDF creates an Adobe PDF report. Pressing Excel creates an excel report. Image creates a .tiff file of the report. On all of these, a multi-page list will be created, showing all the fields for all the records. The date created and page number will be shown at the bottom. Report title and column headers are displayed for all of the pages. All fields are available for report generating, including those in master-detail pages. Any filters applied to the record list will also be applied to the generated report.

PDF report:

Excel report:

Image report:

This is just a short preview of some of the great user interface features that Web Form Builder applications generated with Code OnTime Generator have to offer. Find more useful resources on our support page.

Labels: ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET Code Generator, Reports, User Interface, Web Form Builder