TakeCharge App Manager Lesson 01: Overview

Today we embark on a fairly complex trip into the development and design of the TakeCharge Application Manager which will be developed in Alpha Software. The function of this application is to be an external vessel which will house any and all applications being developed by the user which is currently me. To help us understand the scope let’s use a visual aid.

Looking at the image above you can see the application manager will work like a master Alpha Software control panel. The user will be able to bring up any application in the parent list and instantly see forms, objects, events, scripts, functions and more for each of the applications in the Project Manager. They will also have the ability to easily find copy and paste code from any of the applications to any other application in the Project Manager.

When I was young and foolish I thought I knew everything and remembered everything I knew. Everything I did was at Warp Speed. Now I know I only know what I see work and if I wish to use it again, I will have to find it, review it refresh my memory of what it actually does, then copy it for reuse at a much slower pace.

Just the other day I had a customer call me about two reports they run every month and they always match. For some reason this month they did not. (Resulted from a change in a data entry process of the raw data.) If I had this system in place, I would have found the reports with the filters, field reference and calculations easily explained. Then I would have fixed the issue and sent the solution back to the customer. What I actually had to do is download their entire application, run the reports, open both reports in design mode, look at all the raw data and calculations called by the reports and finally modify the filter so the reports were again in balance. What could have been done in 30 minutes took 3 hours and 15 minutes and since they are under a service agreement the time was on me.

With that said, I am eager to get this project going. So next we will take our first look at our table and form design for our App Manager and the initial code on our Clock Calendar. Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend.