Project Objective II: Eliminate the need for a programmer to change screen layout.

It is an expensive and time consuming task to make those changes. Having twenty years of experience programming accounting applications for the green industry taught us that decisions made on the display of information could make the task easy and quick or slow and cumbersome. Unfortunately easy and quick in one business process could mean slow and cumbersome for another. The shipping clerk needs vastly different views of the customer file from the accounts receivable manager. It was therefore an objective to let individual users to determine what they see of the information available to them.

This objective was accomplished early in the development process with the definition of different screen views and file open capabilities. Each user has a file called a user layout (suffix of .ULA). A user layout file contains the information on the fields displayed, where they are displayed and in what order they are displayed on each window.

Understanding that UDS provides the tools to see the information you want that is kept in your database and that the information you want is different for each business process, can help you understand how Windows and the UDS system works. The concept of a Window into YOUR data needs to be understood by every user. Windows offers a very good method of explaining this function. Your information is on the computer and UDS provides a Window into that information over which you have display control.

For security reasons the Order and Position functions are separate from the Arrange function. The individual user may have access to the employee file for name and address fields, but may not be allowed to see or change the employees wage. As a user I could put the information I am allowed to see in any order I wish, but I may not be allowed to change the amount of information I see. The user layout function controls the order and position of each window. The user layout function is called Modify Layout. The part of the information displayed on the window is controlled by the person(s) that have access to the Arrange Columns or Arrange Fields menu options.

The power of Windows allows us to present these functions in a way that is understandable and usable by most personnel. A great deal of the users responsibility is to know the business process that must be mimicked by the computer to determine what information is necessary to accomplish this task. Note that this entire discussion revolves around the needs of the user and the business process not on what a computer programmer thinks should be displayed on the screen. “Power to the users” could be a slogan for the UDS ActiveApplications.