Looking for suggetions for order entry

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Greetings. My company is currently using a Lotus Notes based order entry application that was created in house. It’s a great tool and one that I’m very proud of. The application takes large orders (created by sales reps) and uploads the orders via LEI into our ERP system via scheduled activity strings. The variety of items/categories we sell is very wide and includes some footwear and apparel categories that require style/size/color type entry.

The company now feels that this tool is slow and that the reps want more of a spreadsheet functionality to enter orders. I’ve looked a little into this and even into the RichText object to see if there is a good way to create in Notes tables that basically look and act like a spreadsheet and I’m not seeing what I’m looking for.

Does anyone have any expertise in this area or know of any companies who have products that can handle really complex order entry processes?

Thanks.

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Subject: Looking for suggetions for order entry

Someone else has already suggested the InViewEdit functionality, which will probably do what you want. However, as far as I can tell it only works if there is already one row in the view. You can’t create the first row from the view level. Maybe there’s some magic to getting this to work, I never could figure it out.

I haven’t done this myself, but I believe you could actually embed an Excel workbook object into a Notes form and have it store the data with the Notes form. I’m not completely sure about that so some experimentation might be necessary.

I work around the difficulty of doing a dynamic grid in Notes by using a table and each column is a separate multivalue field. There is an Add button that lets users add new rows, which is a form that never gets saved, I just copy the field values back to the original document. One set of fields stores the data, then a corresponding set of computed text elements uses @Implode(field;@NewLine) to display them as rows. It took a while for me to bend my brain around it but now that I get it, I use it a lot and it works great. I adapted it from an article in Lotus Notes Advisor magazine and you can probably find it on their website.

I hope some of that is helpful.

– Charles

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Subject: RE: Looking for suggetions for order entry

“I work around the difficulty of doing a dynamic grid in Notes by using a table and each column is a separate multivalue field.”

I have also found the approach that Charles mentioned to be efficient and fully reliable. I am using a similar method in some applications that use arrays in lotusscript to grab the contents of the multivalue fields for data manipulation…such as adding or removing items or adjusting price levels…then clearing the fields and writing the entire arrays directly back to them. As Charles said you have to play with the fields/formulas a little bit to get them to work as desired. I will send you what I have if you need a starting point.

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Subject: RE: Looking for suggetions for order entry

Thank you very much for all responses. Andrew I use exactly what you refer to with the “dynamic grid in Notes by using a table and each column is a separate multivalue field” and then display each value in each field with a blank line in between. So, for example, if the first column has an item number field and the second has item description field as long as the values don’t wrap then they’ll line up nicely. Sometime with the style, size, color item categories that can have up to 20 shoe sizes the grid gets so wide that I have trouble avoiding the wrap and once it wraps the lining up of corresponding values get’s all out of whack.

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Subject: Looking for suggetions for order entry

Have you looked into “inviewedit” capabilities yet? That may provide the functionality you are looking for:

"You can give Notes users the ability to edit fields in an existing document or create a new document from a view. For example, you might use this feature in a ToDo view to change a work item from Incomplete to Complete. The Domino 6 mail template uses this feature to allow you to enter an appointment into your calendar from the calendar view.

Note This feature is not supported for Web users.

Usage Notes

InViewEdit events will work for embedded views as long as the “Selection tracks mouse movement” is not checked on the Display tab of the Embedded View Properties box. InViewEdit events are not triggered in an embedded view if this feature is enabled.

This feature is not supported in views from another database that are embedded in a rich text field. For example, trying to create or edit a document in a view from a discussion database embedded in a mail message results in an error.

The InViewEdit event works for folders as well as for views. However, if a user presses Ctrl-Click to create a new document in a folder, the new document is created, but is not put into the folder. Instead, it will appear in views for which it meets the selection criteria. As with other cases, the document must be explicitly dragged, moved, or added to the folder.

Note Users will be prompted to Ctrl-Click to create a document when there is at least one document already in the view. If the Ctrl-Click line on a view is not entirely visible, and there is no vertical scrollbar to scroll down further, users can press Ctrl-End to make it more visible.

To allow users to edit documents in a view

To let users edit an existing document without first opening the document, you must first identify the columns containing user-editable fields. Then you must supply code that controls what a user can do when editing the associated field. You can mark more than one column as editable. For each column you want to allow the user to edit:

  1. Select the column that will display the editable field.

  2. Choose Design - Column Properties.

  3. Check “Editable column” on the Info tab (i) of the Column Properties box.

  4. Click the Inviewedit event in the View objects list in the Programmer’s pane.

  5. Enter code to control what should happen when a user edits the field, as described in the programming topic InViewEdit event.

To allow users to create a new document from a view

  1. Select the view from which users can create new documents.

  2. Choose Design - View Properties.

  3. Check “Create new documents at view level” on the Info tab (i) of the View Properties box.

  4. Click the Inviewedit event in the View objects list in the Programmer’s pane.

  5. Enter code to create the new document, set the form value and to check and validate entries for the new document, as described in the programming topic InViewEdit event.

Coding notes

There is only one InViewEdit event per view. The event is called multiple times for each edit and uses a parameter called RequestType to determine whether Notes should be providing default information, validating data, or saving changes to documents in the view.

More than one column can be marked as user-editable.

Use the programmatic name as set in the Advanced tab of the Column Properties box as the name of the field that gets updated when the column is edited. This will make coding the InViewEdit event easier to identify the column you are marking as editable.

Code the RequestType parameter with a value of 4 to handle document creation.

For a complete description of how to code the InVewEdit event, see the topic InViewEdit event."