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As a young teenager I use to show goats at the Utah County and Utah State fairs. My parents would park our family trailer at the fair grounds and let my brother and me spend the week taking caring for the animals and hanging around the fairgrounds—it was almost like living on our own. I fondly remember one year the excitement of taking home $56 in prize winnings and several best of show ribbons.
I’m pretty sure running fairs in the 80’s involved lots of paper and few computers to make the job easier. Thanks to people like Mike Hnatt the business of running fairs gets more efficient every year. In 1994 Mike was working as an assistant for the Texas Agricultural Cooperative Extension. He was approached by the chairman of the local county fair for a better way to manage the fairs records. He built the first version of ShoWorks using Microsoft Access 2.0 (people tell me it was one of the best releases ever).
Their web site claims ShoWorks is today the #1 selling fair management software and serves most of the state fairs and county fairs in the US and Canada. Mike told me they are just under $1 million annual sales! You can read about their history on the ShoWorks blog.
Gladstone has recently shipped their most significant upgrade since 1996 with almost 1,000 enhancements. I asked Mike what new features in Access 2007 did he find most useful?
Here are some screen shots.
Main Menu - Shows the main interface with various ways to access the data entry forms.
Customizable Layouts - Users may add fields (even their own user defined fields) in forms, including the ability to rename fields and specify their position on the form.
Checks - Checks are automatically generated.
Report Manager - Reports are managed through drag-drop grouping.
Report Wizard - Custom reports may be created and edited at any later time, with a user-friendly report writer.
Automatic Backups - Amazon's S3 services provide a safe way for users to have automated backups of the backend data.
Pretty cool stuff. It reminds me that I need to get my kids to the Puyallup County Fair this fall and teach my kids how to judge goats. Who knows—maybe we will grow a giant strawberry and cash a check printed by ShoWorks.
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Can users made changes in forms/reports under Access runtime?
@Vladimir Yes - users can make changes in both forms and reports under the Access runtime. The customize layout feature we made for forms allows users to select which fields (a predefined list that we have hidden on the form) to display and where to place them, as well as re-label the fields (re-labeled fields have a different color to identify that they are not the original field name, with a mouse over to reveal the original name). This layout for each form is stored in a table either in the front-end or the back-end and is called in the OnLoad event for a given form. The report writer creates an actual Access report object from scratch just as the Microsoft report writer would do (textbox and label controls, and the SQL record source with dynamic filtering are created in the fly). We then store these specifications as long strings in the report's tag properties, which, between several of them, have plenty of room. This allows us to retrieve them at anytime, allowing the user to pull up the report wizard at a later time to "edit" the report even in the runtime environment. We now market this report wizard for Access developers here: http://gladstonesolutions.com
I always enjoy learning what other people think about Amazon Web Services and how they use them. If you want to manage Amazon S3 accounts on Windows check out my freeware product CloudBerry Explorer. http://cloudberrylab.com/
It's nice that Access application can finally look and feel like they belong in 2009 rather than 1999. I like the look of the dashboard.
What sort of controls were used?
We used one native ActiveX control which was the MSComctlLib.TreeCtrl.2 which is my favorite. As you may know, this comes with Windows and allows a nice tree structure that allows for drag/drop capabilities. We used this to list the report objects and allow users to group them by dragging and dropping. A note that we have not had any problems at all with the ActiveX/DLL "hell" that used to happen in the old days when apps were built with these. We have an install base in the thousands and have yet to have an issue. The 3rd party controls we used in this app were: -[ctNavBar] for the "I want to..." navigation tree on the main menu. By DBI Technologies: http://www.dbi-tech.com -[ctTree Control 7.0] which is another tree control used in another form in the app that has a lot more flexibility. Also made by DBI Technologies. - [IBiz Amazon Integrator V2 S3 Control] for the online backups that we allow the customers to send their data via Amazon's S3 service. Made by /nsoftware: http://www.nsoftware.com/ -[IP Works! ActiveX/COM Edition] which has lots of Internet related controls, including both an FTP and HTTP methods which allow our app to send data files to our servers as well as post and retrieve data to/from webpages. Also made by /nsoftware.
Thanks for the details on the control used.
Your application is certainly one of the nicest Access applications I've seen and it looks very user-friendly.
Can users made changes in forms/reports in MDE/ACCDE/ACCDR?
Oops: Can users made... => Can users make...
Wow very nice !! Each form have a separately blue background or you use the same each time ?
Did you use Visio to prepare the picture at the centre of the Main Menu page?
@Vladimir Unfortunately, the MDE/ACCDE restriction does not allow for object creation so our app is broken down into 3 files: 1) Front-end: The main interface as an .accdb renamed to our own extension to not confuse users and is lightly secure by running processes on start such as to disable the F11 key, opening the main menu uncloseable, etc. This holds many of the forms, all reports, all queries, a few modules and macros that are not sensitive (code that we don't worry about being secure), and allows for report creation with our own wizard (see earlier post) even in runtime. This references our library file (.mde/.accde) which is more secure. 2) Library: This is where we store most modules and a few sensitive forms as an .mde/.accde and referenced into the front-end. 3) Back-end: This .mdb/.accdb is where our tables are located and has been renamed to our own extension. The cool thing here is that renaming it to our own extension allows us to set Windows file extension association to our own extension so that when they double-click on any of our back-end files, our little VB starter app takes the location of the double-clicked file, writes this location to the registry, starts our application (front-end) upon which the front-end loads the appropriate file as the current back-end file.
@Michael Each form has its own blue background. It's just a setting in the form's property, and then two graphics: one for the curve, and the other which is a stretchable graphic that extends the curve when the window is resized. @grovelli No, for the main menu graphics I just used Adobe Photoshop for the arrows and mostly stock icons purchased from VirtualLNK (an awesome site) found here: http://www.virtuallnk.com/
That is a really beautiful looking application. It is simply inspiring to any access developer. Thanks for sharing this. I think the look and feel of applications are extremely important today. Users don’t understand code or anything else under the hood. All users see is the outside. When you see a really fantastic car, you tend to think it’s well built. Good looks is an extremely important part of applications written today, especially when you’re going to be selling them. I think it was one day after access 2003 came out, and I was re-deploying my applications to clients using themed controls. I really liked that feature. I think the default shaded datasheets in access 2007 are absolutely gorgeous. Throw in new features like resizing of controls, the allowing of different pictures in a continuous forms without third party controls and access is really nice. In fact, at the end of the day I think access 2007 applications now look as good as applications written in .net. I was just saying the other day, about the only thing we’re missing native to access now is a nice built in treeview control. However, as you show, we can use the treeview and other 3rd party controls to round out a very nice UI in access. Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com
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