Tag: tech

Converting from Clarify Desktop to Dovetail Agent (part 3)

July 16, 2010 Welcome to part 3 of the series on converting an application from the Clarify Desktop environment to work in Dovetail Agent/Admin. The Employee Manager Utility (EMU) is being migrated into Dovetail Admin, and will provide the tools needed to manage workgroups and the employees that are assigned to them. In the installment of the series, the functionality for the Add... button of the form is going to be implemented. This is going to be a different method that what is normally used in Dovetail Admin due to the fact that workgroups are actually just elements in the WORKGROUP user defined list. EMU adds a lot of information and configuration capability for a workgroup, but there needs to be a record in table_workgroup to hold the details. The Add... button has a small hint that it will have different behavior…

Converting from Clarify Desktop to Dovetail Agent (part 2)

July 15, 2010 This is the second installment of a series of posts on migrating applications/enhancements from the Clarify desktop application to Dovetail Agent features. The plan was for this post to cover converting Clarify Forms into Dovetail Agent/Admin pages. That is a great idea, but a very ambitious goal for a single post. I will be making a few posts along this line instead, trying to highlight the best practices and throw in a good amount of example code to help pave the way for such a conversion. The example conversion of Employee Manager Utility (EMU) from a Clarify desktop integration to a new feature for Dovetail Agent and Dovetail Admin has a lot of possibilities for things to talk about. There are all kinds of controls used on the main form: a filtered grid, multiple tabs, checkboxes, text boxes, dropdowns,…

Converting from Clarify Desktop to Dovetail Agent

July 12, 2010 This is the first installment of a new series of posts on migrating applications/enhancements from the Clarify desktop application to Dovetail Agent features. There are usually a few components involved – schema changes, customized forms, and custom code – that all need to be converted in some form or fashion. For this series of posts, I will be migrating the Employee Manager Utility (EMU) from a Clarify desktop integration to a new feature for Dovetail Agent and Dovetail Admin. EMU is part of the Administration Series, and was last modified when Dovetail Software was still known as First Choice Software. The first things to do is to examine the Employee Manager Utility product. EMU is an administration tool that allows an administrator to associate employee properties (such as queues, office location, supervisor, and resource configuration) to a workgroup. New employees…

jQuery 1.3 is now official!

January 14, 2009 jQuery just released its latest version, and celebrates its 3rd birthday as a JavaScript Library. The big features of this release are: Sizzle: A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine. Live Events: Event delegation with a jQuery twist. jQuery Event Overhaul: Completely rewired to simplify event handling. HTML Injection Rewrite: Lightning-fast HTML appending. Offset Rewrite: Super-quick position calculation. No More Browser Sniffing: Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come. jQuery at Dovetail Software Almost all of our current development projects are using jQuery, so upgrading to the new version to take advantage of the new features and performance will be an exciting improvement. The performance gains in the selector engine and HTML injection should help us improve our software. The benefits of using jQuery is already apparent, and we continue to use it more…

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…

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)!

Goodbye SlickRun! …

... and hello Launchy. This is a minor replacement, but makes life at the keyboard even easier. Like a helpful side-kick, you can train Launchy to open any program with just a few shortcuts. This is the same as SlickRun, but without the magic keyword setup. You can easily change the configuration to use any hot-key combination for popping up Launchy, then just start typing the name of the program you are trying to launch. If you need to browse for it, it will help you traverse down the folder trees as you type folder names and hit tab for auto-completion. I am using it like this so far: vs - Visual Studio ue - UltraEdit ff - fireFox fl - Flare ie - Internet Explorer dt - http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/ iis - IIS Console Other cool stuff found…