Streamlining user experience

pbrad

Hi,
I have a situation where I have an inventory item warehouse BO, one of the attributes is 'warehouse'. There may be hundreds of inventory items at any time and I would like to provide the ability for an inventory controller to 'transfer' multiple items at a time, (change the warehouse attribute).

I have a query that filters the items relevant to a particular 'warehouse' and I have an operation that calls a process that changes the warehouse. the user can either select a particular line or select which lines they want and run the process against those lines. So far, so good. What I want however is to allow the controller to pick which 'warehouse' the process changes the attribute to. I have got it working where I just hard code the attribute in the process(EquipmentInventory.Warehouse='104') but I can't figure out how to make the warehouse to be user defined. I had hoped for something like 'EquipmentInventory.Warehouse=(Ask At Runtime)' so that the user could transfer multiple items to the same warehouse at one time without having to handle multiple transactions.

Any ideas?

aware_support2

You can add an operation to the inventory items query to start the following process. Tick the "Below the list" and "Applicable to multiple items" check boxes for the operation. The process should have 2 rules that would look like these:

PICK FROM 'Warehouse query'
EquipmentInventory.Warehouse = Warehouse

The first rule will let the user choose a warehouse, the second will assign the warehouse to all inventory items selected by the user on the results page of the original query.

pbrad

Hi,
Thanks for your usual prompt response, however, I don't think that I explained myself very well. On the assumption that a picture is worth 243 words, I have uploaded a screencapture of the query output to: .
You can see that I have a series of serialized inventory items that have been filtered to show only the items where the warehouse attribute is 'Stoney Creek'. I have hard coded this version so that on select the process changes the warehouse attribute from 'Stoney Creek' to '104'. What I would like is to provide the ability for the inventory control clerk to enter a warehouse number from '1' to '120' (representing the technicians vehicle inventory warehouses) and then on select, the process would change the parameter from 'Stoney Creek' to the selected warehouse. In other programs, I would probably create a dummy field or a variable for this purpose.

pbrad

Sorry, the image is probably too high a resolution to show this way, I have embedded it into a web page for scrolling.

http://www.thevirtualsalesrep.com/temp/QueryScreenCap.htm

aware_support2

Thanks for the clarification. In the previous reply I assumed that EquipmentInventory.Warehouse was a reference attribute of type Warehouse and that all warehouses would be represented in the system by instances of object Warehouse. Therefore the query would let the user pick a warehouse from a list of available instances and assign it to selected inventory items.

I now understand that EquipmentInventory.Warehouse is in fact a textual attribute that you want to set to the same user-entered value for multiple instances. To do it you can define a non-persistent object (say called IssueWarehouse) with a text attribute (WarehouseNumber) and modify the process as follows:

ENTER NEW IssueWarehouse
EquipmentInventory.Warehouse = IssueWarehouse.WarehouseNumber

The first rule will allow the user to enter the warehouse number, the second rule will assign it to all selected items.

pbrad

Excellent, I have it working perfectly now. I love this software!
Many thanks, Pete