Tag: Sam Tyson

Announcing a New Product Release…

January 12, 2009 This is always a good sign for a software company, and here at Dovetail Software this has just become an easier task. It is important for us to get the news about a new product release to our customers. By automating some of the steps in this task, we can get the information to the customer faster, and also add some business value to the process. Now when a new release is ready, we can use the new Product Announcement tool to prepare the message for our customers. Opening this application from within our in-house version of Dovetail Agent, we can see a list of all of our products that are currently under contract with any of our customers. Clicking on one of the products will retrieve all of the customers under contract, and show a second grid filled with…

Run-Time Query Parameter Evaluation

September 22, 2008 Overview One of the new features coming soon in Dovetail Agent 4.1 is the enhanced capability of using parameters in fcQuery that will be evaluated when a query is executed. This allows queries to be designed with much more flexible structure. Dates are a very important parameter to be evaluated at run-time, and being able to build the query to do this automatically keeps the user from having to enter the date manually when running the query. Queries can be created to look at specific date-oriented information (i.e. This Week) without having to change to values of the date parameters each time the query is run. Shared queries are also a very easy place to see where run-time evaluation of a query parameter will be helpful. For example, if a query is created (and shared to all users) to find…

Spell Check feature added to Dovetail Agent

August 26, 2008 As part of the continuous effort to enhance and improve our applications, a new Spell Check feature was added for the next release of Dovetail Agent. This feature was added for every text area input in the pages of Agent. Currently there are almost 100 different pages in Dovetail Agent that use text area controls. Adding the new functionality to every page individually would be one way of implementing the change, but certainly not the most efficient. Instead, the new functionality is added dynamically to each page as it is opened in the browser. This approach makes a lot of sense. Since the code that adds the link under each text area is contained in one file, any future modifications will be very easy as well. The Spell Check feature is made available to the user by adding a Check…

Opening View Objects from Query Results

August 7, 2008 In Dovetail Agent, it is very easy to build a query against a table in the database, and there are standard routines to open most of the table objects to view the items returned in the query. Drilling down to view objects is a little tougher, but it can be done in a few easy steps. In this example, I will show you how to build a query object for the queelm_case view, which will allow us to open each of the cases in the queue for inquiry. Building the fcQuery object in Dovetail Admin is the first step, so follow along. After logging in to Dovetail Admin, click on the fcQuery Objects menu link to open the Manage fcQuery Objects page. Typing in queelm_case and clicking the List button locates the view object, and double-clicking the queelm_case row will…

jQuery = Simplification

July 11, 2008 I came across this code today, and it took me a second to figure out what it was doing: strSortOrder = document.getElementById("ad").options[document.getElementById("ad").selectedIndex].value; To break it down, it locates a Select control on the page (FindElementById), finds the element again and gets its selected value's index (selectedIndex), and sets the variable to the value of the option at the specified index (options[index].value). There is a jQuery plugin that really simplifies this process. Using jquery.selectboxes.js, the code now is as simple as this: strSortOrder = $("#ad").selectedValues(); This code now does the same thing, but it is also easy to read, and understand. It shortened from 86 characters to 26, and now requires no explanation. There are many different cases where jQuery can simplify the code.

Other Cool Tools

April 14, 2008 I learned about a couple of other cool tools from J.P. Boodhoo last week, and thought I would pass them along. Console2 http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ This is a replacement for the CMD shell. It is a tabbed window, and each tab can be defined as a different shell process. Unlocker http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ I just want to delete that folder... Grrrr... here comes Unlocker to the Rescue! Unlocker will pop up after you close the annoying pop-up window, and show you what programs have the file locked, and give you the option to easily free the file. Very nice UI to give you the control that you want (and need)!

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