GNUe Traffic #72 For 15 Mar 2003

Editor: Peter Sullivan

By Arturas Kriukovas  and  Peter Sullivan

Table Of Contents

• Printer-Friendly Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Threads Covered

  1.	6 Mar 2003		Dialog boxes in Forms 0.5.x
  2.	7 Mar 2003		Release Plans for GNUe
  3.	10 Mar 2003		Pricing mechanisms in GNUe Small Business
  4.	11 Mar 2003		wxPython and other UI drivers for GNUe

Introduction

1. Dialog boxes in Forms 0.5.x

6 Mar 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 06 Mar 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Forms

People: Anthony Lenton, Jason Cater, James Thompson, Derek Neighbors

Derek Neighbors (Derek) asked whether readonly dialog had not been finished or if it was the final version. Because as of time of writing they did not look like error messages. James Thompson (jamest) explained that now all dialogs were .gfd forms and it was easy to change them to make look like real error boxes.

Later, Anthony Lenton (aa) said he had some patches, but as he was "not working on the *latest* 0.5, could already be changed/fixed)" . Jason Cater (jcater) noted that "cvs head has changed a lot recently" . Mainly UIdriver system, bugfixes, lots of rearranging. James said "the biggest change will be you can do <dialogs> now that work which I think will probably replace some custom stuff you had to do in that last patch cluster you sent us" . "Most of the internal dialogs now use the new setup (all but login dialog). You can find examples in forms/src/dialogs. So you can do custom dialogs a few different ways. You can define them in .gfd files or gfd libraries, or if you want to bundle a custom gnue-forms you can add directories under forms/src/dialogs and follow that format - forms can't tell the difference where they came from." . Anthony was interested "how does the caller know the outcome of the dialog?" James explained - "dialogs are modal and have a parameters dict passed into them. They manipulate that dict which you can then check" .

2. Release Plans for GNUe

7 Mar 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 07 Mar 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Application Server, Forms, Common, Designer, Reports

People: Reinhard Müller, Jan Ischebeck, Jason Cater

Jason Cater (jcater) asked Reinhard Müller (reinhrad) whether he wanted a point release of appserver with the release of forms/common/designer (that was planned for a week or two). Jason was also planning to do a non-major release of reports at the same time. Reinhard explained this "depends on whether i can get hold of" Jan Ischebeck (siesel) as "I have some points i have to decide w/ him before any further release of appserver because this decision could break compatibility and i don't want a release and break it a week afterwards" .

3. Pricing mechanisms in GNUe Small Business

10 Mar 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 10 Mar 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Small Business

People: Derek Neighbors, Mike Vincent

Derek Neighbors (revDeke) wanted to check some previous work he had done on item pricing which recorded both a 'cost' and a 'base price' for an item. "every one of their customers had own item and price list (this is likely more 'distributor' oriented than 'retail' oreinted). The concept is I might offer 800 products, but to customer A only 100 of them might be available for purchase and customer A might pay more than customer B for item xyz, so basically pricing is set at 'customer' level" . Most customers would default to the default price, but other customers might get preferential discounts. Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) thought "the best way to do it, is to have simply a 'price' field in the item table. Then there should be a discounts table (or whatever you wanna call it) which references the products in the product table and has a qty and price. Then when needing a price for a product" - "the discount table would need to be checked.. and if no discount item or if the qty ordered were less than that in the discount table the price from the item table would be used."

Derek said that, if people did not want to use something this complicated, they could simply have the same discount rate (which might be 0%) for all customers. Also, he noted that discounts would probably be related to the total volumes being ordered over time by a customer, not necessarily the volume of a particular product on a particular order. Mike agreed - he was aware of wholesalers who had "a piece price, dozen price, and case price and a secret '4th line' price they give to the high volume accounts which is a bit better than their published 'case pricing'" Derek said "as long as we add ability to do 'customer' based discounts - you can do 'volume discount'" and "then compare that to the 'customer' discount (if one exists) and take the lower of the two" .

Derek felt that this level of sophistication on pricing was where "the shrink wrap stuff SERIOUSLY falls down on its face" - "the more agile you can be with your pricing the more effective you can be" . It was not unknown for gas stations/petrol stations to change price several times a day.

4. wxPython and other UI drivers for GNUe

11 Mar 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 11 Mar 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Common

People: Jason Cater, Adam Hull

Adam Hull (fixe) doubted whether wxWindows was really a good choice. Jason Cater (jcater) explained that "wxWindows was a means to an end, not a permanent solution" . As of time of writing, Jason was "committing an almost complete (usable today) QT3 driver" . Also work was beeing done on native GTK2 and Win32 drivers.

Sharon And Joy