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12/16/2005 5:15 PM
 

First off, let me say that this may not be a big deal to most people, but I imagine it'd be useful to a lot. Basically, I have data that various people are tracking that needs to get reported up to senior management. Senior management likes to see pretty trafficlight-style displays - green is good, red is bad; I'm sure you get the idea. I have to do this on several tables, so I plan on implementing this. I'd like some feedback from others, tho...

I'm working off the 3.2 code-base, so I have 11 field types (string, int, boolean, currency, decimal, date, time, date/time, URL, email, and image). For all numeric fields, it's easy - there'll be min and max values. For string, boolean, URL, email, and image I plan on basically just supporting equal and not equal. The problem comes in with the dates and times.

The problem with dates and times is that coloring needs to be relative to a certain date/time. I'm guessing that, 90% of the time, the current day will be used. For instance, if I'm tracking the last renwal of annual licenses, I may want the field to display as red if the renewal is past due, yellow if within 30 days, and green for anything else. For dates, I feel it's pretty safe to assume that I can provide a number based off the date diff from today (yesterday = -1, tomorrow = 1). This is kind of odd logic to parse without seeing it, so I'll try to post an example later (don't have time right now). On to the bigger problem, tho...

Times. I highly doubt anybody will be wanting coloring based on time values, but it's possible. Common sense tells me to do the same as the dates but use hours instead. How does that sound? Now, of course, I know that once this is out there, somebody is going to want it in minutes. That wouldn't hurt the hours standpoint, but I'd hate to make it overly complicated for those interested in hours if there isn't a need for it.

There are a lot of things I could do to make it so these issues would come up (more robust color picking and comparison options); but I'm not getting paid for this, so if you want it, email me In the meantime, I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts on this. Does anyone need/want this? I only need coloring on dates right now, but have numeric coloring right around the corner. If anyone has any questions or comments, please let me know. I want to make sure to do this right the first time because it's pretty extensive (for just a color ).

Oh, and by the way, I'm giving bg color, fg color, and CSS class options.


Michael Flanakin | Microsoft Consulting Services
www.michaelflanakin.com
 
New Post
12/19/2005 9:52 AM
 
As of right now, I plan on comparing Date and DateTime fields based on days and Time fields based on minutes. I've considered comparing DateTime fields using days and minutes in a <days>.<minutes> format (i.e. 1.30 = 1 day, 30 minutes), but decided against it to simplify my dev/test time. If anyone thinks this feature would be beneficial to them, I can add it (it'd only change 1 stored proc); otherwise, I'll just leave it out there for the future.

I should be done with this by the end of the week and I'll try to get it to the UDT team by the end of next week. I'll also work on getting some screenshots together, if anyone's interested.

Michael Flanakin | Microsoft Consulting Services
www.michaelflanakin.com
 
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12/29/2005 2:48 PM
 
Well, I'm done with it. Numeric comparisons (which include dates and times) support >, <, >=, <=, =, and <>. String comparisons (everything else) support =, <>, like, and not like. You can specify a background color, foreground color, and/or CSS class. I'll try to get some screenshots up, but probably won't get to that until next week - time to take a day off and party in Atlanta all weekend

There is definitely room for improvement. Specifically, I'd like to have a more centrallized set of methods to determine comparison types. It's kind of complicated and takes a bit of thinking to determine which one is correct - all behind the scenes, of course. Another thing I'd like to do would be to support more than just the SQL wildcards in the like and not like comparisons. Either way, it's done for now. I just have to package it up, deploy it to my production server, and setup 4 or 5 modules to use it instead of the IFrame they're currently using (for migration reasons).

Michael Flanakin | Microsoft Consulting Services
www.michaelflanakin.com
 
New Post
12/29/2005 2:51 PM
 
Oh yeah, one more thing I'd like to add is the ability to support the updated by and update date columns that are coming in 3.2.1. I already have these in mine since I implemented them a few weeks ago, but it'd be nice to be able to support coloring on those columns.

Michael Flanakin | Microsoft Consulting Services
www.michaelflanakin.com
 
New Post
1/1/2006 8:27 PM
 
Here're some screenshots from what I was working on. I have a custom container, so just ignore that...









Michael Flanakin | Microsoft Consulting Services
www.michaelflanakin.com
 
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