redesign of browser : Notes popup ?

found a perfect example of what I am trying to acheive :

http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/josh_smith/archive/2008/09/15/introducing-a-new-xamdatagrid-behavior-displayadorningeditors.aspx

trouble is it's in xaml ... trying to find a .net equivalent !

I seem to remember the .NET version also having something similar. I know Mike and I have touched the subject a while ago in the Dynamics 4.NET implementation.

I can't remember the name of the feature though....

what would it take to make you remember ? Bribes ? Torture ? ... I'll make you work with v3 ...

I'll make you work with v3 ... 

You've got a copy to share? A platform that still runs?

I lost the V4 disks when I cleared out the garage a year ago. I think they ended up in the skip by accident. /me sobs.

I haven't had v3 disks since late '87

I've got v4 disks.

But the media has degraded to unreadability -- I managed to get the bare minimum off the disks 5 or so years ago and actually got it running on a very old PC that happened to be laying around.

Preserving this stuff isn't easy.

I think it would be really cool if PSC put up every release from the dawn of time forward somewhere in Amazon's cloud so that we could fiddle around for old times sake

Hi Julian,

what kind of a popup are you looking for? The screenshot from your XAML sample (the IG blog) seems to be showing a formatted Control as a popup. Similar to what you can do with a "Control Popup Container" in the toolbars manager. I guess such a feature is not supported natively by the grid, so you'd have to control a number of events to know when and where to display such a control the verlays the browser.

If your note is simple enought that if can be done using the ultraTooltipManager. You should define a default (formatted) tooltip in the property sheet of the ultraGrid and modify it when a row is selected.

Use something like the AfterSelectChange event of the grid and then

ultraToolTipManager1:GetUltraToolTip (THIS-OBJECT:ultraGrid1):ToolTipTitle = "New Tooltip Title" .     
ultraToolTipManager1:ShowToolTip(THIS-OBJECT:ultraGrid1) .

There are other signatures of the ShowToolTip method, maybe

ultraToolTipManager1:ShowToolTip(THIS-OBJECT:ultraGrid1, FALSE, oPoint) .

makes more sense as oPoint let's you define where the Tooltip is shown (default is the current mouse position).

HTH,

Mike

Unfortunately things are never simple. The idea of the popupcontrol container seems ideal, as what I want to display may be a little complex. For example, if the order has a phone call associated with it, I would like to show the details of the call, along with some UI controls to listen to the call.

The problem I am struggling with is to know *when* to popup the control. The nice thing with the tooltip control is that there is a built-in time delay.

Perhaps I could combine the two - intercept the "showing" event on the tooltip, and show the popup instead . Hmmm.

Thanks

You might want to think about this a bit more.  Tool tips are OK as a technology for providing help information since people can rather unconsciously get assistance merely by hesitating over the thing they are unsure about.  But, that isn't really a very good mechanism for delivering key information and daily use functionality.  Why not simply provide one or more buttons to either pop up a dialog box or, better yet, one of those buttons for More Options or More Information that expands the screen to include the additional data?

tamhas wrote:
You might want to think about this a bit more.  Tool tips are OK as a technology for providing help information since people can rather unconsciously get assistance merely by hesitating over the thing they are unsure about.  But, that isn't really a very good mechanism for delivering key information and daily use functionality.  Why not simply provide one or more buttons to either pop up a dialog box or, better yet, one of those buttons for More Options or More Information that expands the screen to include the additional data?

There's more to this than you think. The notes are not valuable until the user needs them - and there may be pages of the stuff. At the moment, we are reserving a part of the screen for stuff that only sometimes get read. And, there may be more to the order - there may be a phone call, other instructions etc. I don't want to pop up a dialog because they then have to click or close the box before they can move to the next order. I don't want to "expand" the screen because it is a waste of screen space. A popup control box (not a tooltip, as I mentioned before) would provide me with the functionality of the dialogbox without the user having to press a button to view it.

Two thoughts:

1. Use an image column to indicate the type of note(s) available. When the user clicks the column you may open a dialog - or just a Control (Panel) somewhere - and hide it when the user clicks somewhere else.

2. Play aroung with Intragistics UltraExpandableGroupBox. Use it in a TableLayoutPanel in a second row (the Grid in Row 1) with the size mode of that row set to Automatic. Nice effect.

I'm with Mike in thinking there should be a visual clue as to what is available.  And "expand" doesn't need to translate into filling the screen with a lot of spaces that only apply sometimes.  Just expand it a little to provide room for the note or audio or whatever the user has indicated interest in.  And, no need to leave it that way.  Selecting a different content could close any open extra content or moving to a different record or could cause it to go back to the minimum.  Affordance matters.

You can add a rudimentary popup by adding a panel as a child of the container that host the browser. Set its initial visibility to false.

We eventually settled for a card view of a grid. We had to use a devexpress component though, as the IG control didn't work with a particular function that we needed. A bug was logged.