Document Explorer
A huge bottleneck in transporting goods is that it can involve a lot of paperwork which has to be kept for future reference. The client’s application used to keep track of transport trajectories and actions currently does not have a very intuitive way of linking this paperwork to the system. The time spent on this task should be kept to a minimum and therefore has to be very user friendly.
The first requirement is a way of associating the digitized documents, which are saved to a folder, with a specific action of a transport trajectory. The second requirement is that a later stage, it should be possible to lookup these documents and view them in place. These requirements are met in the Document Explorer by creating two separate modules.
Association. This module presents the user with a page that is split in half. On the right we have the document pane. This pane shows a thumbnail for each of the digitized documents in the specified folder. In order to associate this document with a specific trajectory, we must first find the trajectory reference information on the document. By double-clicking a document we open the document in a larger view. This view allows the user to perform some basic operations on the document in order to improve the readability. Basic actions include zooming, rotating as well as brightness and contrast manipulation. Once the user has been able to identify the trajectory reference data on the document, he or she can use this data to search for the specific trajectory in the system. When this is found, a simple drag drop operation of the document creates an association between the two.
Lookup. In a later stage, the user must be able to lookup the associated documents of a trajectory. The lookup module provides this functionality by showing a "Find” page that allows the user to search for the documents. Once the trajectory is found, the user can view its details and a preview of the associated digitized documents.
By working with Vidyano, we were able to create the above in a very short time span while using the latest in .NET 3.5 technology such as WPF and LINQ to SQL. The built-in designers and wizards allowed us to create a nice looking, very intuitive, application with little effort. The application’s architecture, provided out of the box, also greatly satisfied our needs. User interface and business logic are cleanly separated, and by splitting the application’s functionality over multiple modules it becomes much more maintainable.
