Eric Wise

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Easy Assets .NET Development (with Demo)

Ok guys, I've decided I'm going to attempt to blog out some code and development notes that I went through in creating my company's asset management program, Easy Assets .NET.

Now obviously, it will be easier for you all to follow along if I give you a login/password to a demo version of the software running on one of my servers so here you go:

http://server1.easywebapps.com

uid: guest@easywebapps.com

pwd: testing123

The guest account I set up has all privileges except administrator, so you'll be able to play with all the features except the role based security (also prevents any mischief, I'm trusting that no one will change the password, so if you're reading this, don't be a dick, I'll take out the change password for the guest account if I have to, but I'd rather not spend my time doing that).

Once you're logged into the system, you'll notice that most of the menu areas have descriptive text about what the purpose of the area is.  I designed this application (EASY assets) to be very intuitive, so you should be able to get around the system without any help files.  However, if you'd like some documentation, just click the blue question mark at the bottom of the menu and take a peek at the quickstart guide.

Of course, if you find any errors/exceptions, please let me know.  Also, if anything in the system strikes you as neat or gives you a “how'd he do that?“ thought, post it here and I'll be sure to include it in the future articles.

I'm going to break this application down into logical article sections over the next couple weeks and blog it!  For now, feel free to poke around and have fun with it!

 

**NOTE, those of you working with me on the open source project, I know I haven't been around much lately, I plan on picking that up more next week.  I have a major deliverable for a fortune 50 client this week that I'm working on.


Posted Mon, Sep 27 2004 6:40 PM by Eric Wise

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Comments

F Quednau wrote re: Easy Assets .NET Development (with Demo)
on Mon, Sep 27 2004 8:33 PM
Hi there,

just clicked a bit around your demo and created product etc. Looks nice. I noticed that many fields keep state throughout a save operation which shouldn't really. In some cases you it's discussion-worthy, but e.g. category creation where you explicitly state that they must be unique, the textfield shouldn't keep state.

Anyhow, silly to criticise such a big pile of productive work in a little blog comment post :)

Take care
Eric Wise wrote RE: Easy Assets .NET Development (with Demo)
on Tue, Sep 28 2004 1:43 AM
That's actually something I wrestled with and decided to leave the fields as they were post save operation.

The use case I was considering was for like room entry for example. User creates a location, and wants to populate rooms, the rooms are as follows:

Room 100, Room 101, Room 102, Room 103 ...

By not clearing the text it allows them to just edit a single digit instead of typing the whole string.

Same thing with product entry, I'm sort of assuming that at least initially people will be organized enough to enter all the Dell desktops first, then the servers, etc etc etc so I attempted to minimize the number of fields they'd have to re-enter.

When that decision was made, I had to make a decision on whether to clear out the fields that "don't make sense to be there" as you put it. But everywhere else in the program the fields stay populated... so I chose consistency and left them in.

=)
Eric Wise wrote Easy Assets .NET :: Part 1, Defining Goals/Targets
on Tue, Sep 28 2004 7:38 AM
Easy Assets .NET :: Part 1, Defining Goals/Targets
Mark Bonafe wrote re: Easy Assets .NET Development (with Demo)
on Tue, Sep 28 2004 8:23 AM
Nice work, Eric. I have a suggestion, though. You have many links that say "Back to <previous page>." It would be better, I think, to actually call the Back routine of the browser instead of creating a new search page. I mean, I already created a list based on search criteria and I just want to get back to it.

What are you using for a reports engine? Will it page break properly?
Eric Wise wrote RE: Easy Assets .NET Development (with Demo)
on Tue, Sep 28 2004 8:28 AM
Mark- That makes more sense for the search pages, I'll work on changing that soon. For the list pages (like product categories), I wanted it to refresh.

That "feature" is a good example of "copy and paste" syndrome.
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