Drag and Drop Functionality

ara3n

Hello
One more question or opinion. Just something I was thinking about. Drag and drop functionality with v 5. They never mentioned anything. will it be possible? So you could do scheduling for Manufacturing, etc?

kine

You can use external component to show the data and WebServices for transfering the data... but some "native" Drag&Drop in my opinion no - because how do you want to work with it with the C/AL code???

Waldo

kine wrote:

... how do you want to work with it with the C/AL code???

Hm, good question ... .

May be in the new "form"-object (how is it called again?) some new triggers?

kine

I think no. For working with Drag&Drop you need to use classes etc., but as I wrote - external component used as part of the "page" can do it...

Waldo

In VB.NET, yes, but if I'm not mistaken (and remember correctly of my former VB6 life) ... if you have some "OnDragOver" and other events on a form or control, you'll get a long way as well ...

No?

kine

Yes, but you need to know over which you are dragging, what you are dragging... :-)

Waldo

True ...

So probably it's "wishful thinking" ...

jesam

Yes, but you need to know over which you are dragging, what you are dragging...

That's what parameters to functiosn are for. If they could do it in VB6, they should be able to do it in C/AL. Both can speak COM (which does not support inheritance, only interfaces) so I can't see where the problem could be.
Off course, they could decide that since they think Navision developers are not smart enough to switch from C/AL to C# or VB.NET, they are not smart enough to work with drag and drop either.

kine

No, problem is, that C/AL was and I hope will be focused to rapid customizations and changing user interface is not the priority... but you have still tools how to do it with external components... :-)

DenSter

It's all a matter of how much they expose to the NAV IDE, if they will allow us to use the dragover, or drop event or whatever else you need. The new forms are directly based on winforms out of Visual Studio, so it would be easy to assume that we can do everything with them that you can do in VS.

Seeing as numerous other external components were incompletely exposed to NAV though (MSMQ Adapter for instance), I seriously doubt that we will see everything. I do not know about drag and drop though, that would really be nice. Just imagine dragging an Item onto a sales order, or a sales order onto a customer, or like Ahmed said schedule with a drag and drop interface.

ara3n

Think about this. If your warehouse people can have a picture (layout) of the warehouse and the warehouse person just drags and drops goods from one bin to another. It tells him exactly what he was in each bin (Stacks). He doen't need to know about posting or anything to do with accounting. He is just a warehouse guy who moves things around.
Another senerio. customer sells furniture in a store. As he sells the goods and can orgenizes the furniture in showroom. See also visual view of showroom. on how to put things in show room. This just the beginning. I can give you a lot of examples where drag and drop makes sense. Why do you think navision is adding all these new objects, (stacks, graphs).
Nothing needs to be rewritten. The .NET libraries support drag and drop.

ara3n

BlackTiger wrote:

Warehouse workers operating with product codes, not with images. Image means nothing. There is a lot things wich looks similar to each other. But actually they are different products.

Furniture? This is designer's job. Not warehouse worker's, not accountant's. You need CAD for this, not ERP.

Look at some warehouse management software. It's basically managing inventory. Navision allready tried D&D with Planning, by creating a separate executable. Have you looked at that? Look at this way, you get hundreds of email and when you orgenize them, You don't go to command prompt and type move blah email to this folder. Instead uou D&D the files from one folder to another. This is just and example.

To D&D can get complicated because of all different objects that you can drag. In navision, you could drag a set of records.
You could have property on forms or controls to accept records and you can specify what table.
You don't need to implement everything in D&D. Just what makes sense to ERP. The whole of poin of ERP is to record the transactions of a company. It doesn't matter if they use the mouse to do it or the keyboard.
Based on your arguements, you could say that Navision should have stayed in DOS because it could do everything the windows version does without the graphics.

ara3n

BlackTiger wrote:

Nothing needs to be rewritten. The .NET libraries support drag and drop.

EVERYTHING needs to be rewriten! Navision isn't based on normal UI controls. Also D&D is very complicated functionality.

huh?? they've rewritten a new Client in .NET.

Miklos_Hollender

At least leaving the possibility open for DOS-like textmode client would have been nice, because that's a lot easier for uneducated users, can easily be automated with macros etc.

I agree with BlackTiger, ERP should about swiftly entering huge amounts of transactional data, not about nice fancy features.

Drag & Drop in the Production Schedule is a joke, have you ever tried moving an operation to exactly 12:00 with the mouse ? Good luck about that.

The important thing to understand is that software have two kinds of time investment from users: the time of installing, configuring, learning etc. it, and the time using it.

For many software, it's important that keep the initial time investment close to zero: easy to install or even make it web-based, and have a fancy UI with D&D and whatever that everybody learns in a zap.

In ERP, the initial investment is high no matter what, so the important thing would be to keep the time using it - entering records - low, it means, keep it 100% operable from the keyboard. I think independent organizations should keep ERP record-entering benchmark tests (a user keying in f.e. a customer in many systems and compare the times) to force vendors to not only concentrate on "portal-like experience" that is mainly for nice sales demos for dumb decision makers, but to care about real productivity as well.

Said that, there are a few places where D&D can be useful, but not many.

About the new client: I don't have many doubts about that. It will be a thin client, and many of the features are already there in MSCRM running in Internet Explorer. Maybe they just pack together Internet Explorer DLL's with MSCRM functionalities and extend it a bit.

avision form's aren't so special, they are normal MFC forms with a bit of magic added like when it guesses which field to activate when you press the left or righ arrow keys.

Miklos_Hollender

The basic problem with D&D that the mouse is not a productive tool for that. But a multi-touch touchscreen where you could drag up to 10 objects with your ten fingers...

And actually we will have such a multi-touchscreen real soon now! Check out this amazing video: http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/0 ... creen.html

The first /13 of the video is just eye candy, but then it shows amazing real uses.

ara3n

Wow the UI on that is just like in Minority Report except it's done on screen. Imagine doing video editing on that screen.

Yes I agree that ERP should be used to enter data as fast as possible, but those few places where it makes sense to Navision should have some capabilities to be able to do it.

kine

And it is why there will be WebServices - you will be able to do special UI for special Cases... :-)

DenSter

I doubt that they started webservices to support funky UI's, but it is one of the things you can use webservices for

ara3n

Well using a different client for drag and drop with webservices misses the whole point of using navision client for it. With webservices we are again looking from a sepparate client just like what they did with Manufacturing planning client.

kine

No, you can still use the client as part of the page... remember the screenshot with the mappoint?

ara3n

You have to write a .net COM object with GUI. Has to be registered on every computer. write the webservices on Navision. :-k

kine

ara3n wrote:

You have to write a .net COM object with GUI. Has to be registered on every computer. write the webservices on Navision. :-k

No, you can just create some "webpage" on your server and include it in the page... I hope that it will be possible... :-)

Miklos_Hollender

ara3n,

Automatic installation and registering of components is described here: http://www.mibuso.com/howtoinfo.asp?FileID=5&Type=howto (thanx Luc!)

ara3n

kine wrote:

ara3n wrote:

You have to write a .net COM object with GUI. Has to be registered on every computer. write the webservices on Navision. :-k

No, you can just create some "webpage" on your server and include it in the page... I hope that it will be possible... :-)

So now we will be to maintaining a website code and become webdeveopers?

kine

No, but you will need that in a future or when you want some "extra" functionality. It is same like now when you can create automation in C# or VB and use it in Navision... You will be able to create for example some .asp pages and include them in the client...

ara3n

I agree, is just recreating and maintaining all your customers system at your own development servers will be a pain.

StuAllen

Sorry added to wrong topic

girish.joshi

BlackTiger -- installing the COM componenets from Navision is very buggy way to go.

Basically it will break if they start connecting to Navision through terminal services.

ara3n

I'm waiting patiently for October to see the beta version. So all these threads can be put to rest.

Luc_VanDyck

How do you know we get a beta in October?

Marije_Brummel

Has there been an official announcement? The beta should have been in september for what I have heard. But I have not seen any official things.