Tutorial: Lesson One Building a Contact Management Application

Hello everyone, we are starting a programming lesson on how to build a Contact Management Application is Alpha Software. We will be using version 10 of their development platform.

First Lesson we are going to show how to build a complete application using the free Contact App distributed with Alpha Software v10 Each Lesson will be only 5 to 7 minutes in length.
When the series is done, you will have a complete robust Contact Management System you can use or distribute. Let us know if you find this series useful and if you need programming help on other projects you may be working on, contact us. We can and are willing to help.

The Contact App provided freely with Alpha Software v 10 is a simple app intended to show how easy it is to create an app just using the software wizards provided in their development platform.

As you can see from the image, the app opens with a navigation bar to the left and a large area of empty space to the right. We will discuss how to remove the Alpha Software background from the application so the Navigation bar floats on the desktop and when a form is opened it will float on the desktop as well.
First, lets look at the tables and sets used in the current application.

Tables:

• act_memos
• activity
• company
• people
• start
• states
• zip

Sets:

• act_people_set – Links activity to people on a one to one link.
• activity_set – Links people to activity one to many and activity to act_memos one to one.

The linking values are simple field values located in each of the linked tables.  Activity to people is Contact_ID and activity to act_memos is Act_ID

The memo field is a simple memo field and the rest are typical data entry fields such as address, first name, last name etc..

We will examine the current relationship of the tables and discuss different ways of viewing and displaying the data in future lessons. For now, watch this short video on showing the current application as provided by Alpha Software with a short overview of what is to come.

Our next lesson will be posted soon. Thanks for visiting and please comment if you like.