Author: Sam Tyson

July 1, 2008  Dovetail Software, Inc. recently recently received a request from one of our customers to make Queue Membership Management easier and more efficient to use. The screen image to the left shows the Manage Queues form in Dovetail Admin, Version 2.5. When a queue is selected at the top of the form, its current members and supervisors are displayed at the bottom right of the Membership tab.     Adding or changing members and supervisors was done one by one, and with only the login name for each user to determine the identity of each user. The login names are unique, but it can be hard to tell users apart based on login name alone. The new requested functionality to make queue management easier includes adding the first and last name for each user, and allowing multiple users to be added or removed…

The first step in making the changes was to add the first and last names to each of the membership grids. This simply required changing the data source for the user information from the user table to the empl_user view in both of the user grid pages. The grid_queue_mem.asp and grid_queue_mem2.asp pages each retrieve a list of records from the database, and build a table of user information from the results.   Adding multi-select capability required much more change, so it was time to look for a better way to get the job done. This is where jQuery enters the picture. There is an excellent jQuery plugin available for grids, called jqGrid. There is a lot of capability available, and it allows us to simplify the code.   In the previous version of the form shown above, there is an…