OfficeMate

OfficeMate was originally intended as an internship task given to the two interns at Rhea, Bart Wuyts and Joke Van Essche. The task at hand was the development of an application which would be of use in different sectors of the SMB (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) world. The application is intended for the management of clients, products, orders and invoices.

It’s of big importance that the user has the ability to personalize the application, so he/she can adapt it to the needs of that specific SMB-sector. To accomplish this metadata was introduced to the main modules, allowing the user to create/change/delete data fields at runtime. Since Vidyano has a modular design, we had the opportunity to divide the application in four modules:

• Clientmanagement. In this module the user is provided the ability to create and manage clients, and add multiple addresses to that client. Clients can be sorted by client type, these type can help the user in maintaining a clear overview. Basic client data fields are provided, additional data fields have to be added by the user in form of client metadata.

• Productmanagement. Allows the user to manage product categories, a product category defines the unit in which a group of products will be expressed. Every product has standard data fields. Just like in the Clientmanagement module, the users can add additional data fields when needed.

• Ordermanagement. The Ordermangement module allows the user to manage and follow-up orders and invoices. Once an invoice’s pay date has expired, the invoice will be flagged as top priority, with a tooltip providing more information. When the user decides to print an invoice, a print preview will be shown. The invoice preview shows a FixedDocument which contains a user control used to display the data.

• Administration. This module is intended to alter application settings such as: invoice number format, number of items shown per page on an invoice, Company logo, ... . On the MetadataOverview page the user can manage metadata fields, which can be applied to different parts of the application.

The modular design helps maintaining a clear overview throughout the entire application, which adds additional value to the usability of the application. It also ensures easy extensibility to the application, allowing different developers do add additional functionality without altering any of the existing code.

OfficeMate has been created with the latest .Net 3.5 technologies, such as WPF and Linq to SQL, by using Vidyano. Vidyano, a Visual Studio 2008 Add In developed by Rhea, allows beginning and experienced .Net developers to create rich data-driven application in a relative short period. Even if you don’t have any WPF experience you’re able to easily create pages displaying data, by running the wizards that can be applied on any of the Page-Parts generated by the build-in templates. Building on the MVC-pattern, Vidyano allows for a clean separation of business logic from user interface and datamodel.

Bart Wuyts is an “Applied Computer Science Bachelor” graduate student, attending his third year of education at Artesis university college of Antwerp.