Inside the DOCU program (1)

I haven't abandoned this blog; I've simply been going through a few weeks of nothing much interesting happening so there's been little to write about. Over the weekend, I added an interesting twist to an existing program of mine, so I've going to devote a few blog entries to this program.

A year or so ago, the Occupational Psychologist (OP) with whom I work and I had a discussion about program documentation, probably after she asked for some feature and I had told her that I had already added that feature and explained to her how it worked (this happened again a few weeks ago when I was asked to add a feature which I had added in March). Out of this discussion was born the DOCU (as in documentation) program.

From a bottom up point of view, this program can store 'entries' which are connected to 'subjects' which are connected to 'programs'. From the top down point of view, a program - such as the management program - might have several subjects (such as customer calls), and each subject can have several entries (printing the text of a call, creating a linked call, etc). The main form of the program is simply a dialog box with three different grids (one grid per table) which are of course synchronised. There is nothing revolutionary about this so far.

The first interesting twist in the program came as an attempt to find a solution which utilised the Stack Overflow gurus' dislike of MDI programs (such as the management program). It turns out that this was simpler than I had expected. Whilst the main program has two modal sub-forms (one for adding programs to the database and one for adding subjects; under the hood, they're the same form), the 'add entry' form is non-modal. This means that any number of such forms can be displayed on the screen at the same time, when each form can be derived from a different subject. The main form's size is fixed (because it is built on three grids); had I used MDI, then the 'add entry' forms would have been constrained to the area of the main window (which in practical terms means that the main window has to be maximised). Using a non-MDI main form, the non-modal 'add entry' forms can appear anywhere on the screen.

As per the maxim that one picture is worth a thousand words, here is a compressed screenshot of my computer screen with the program running and three 'add entry' forms displayed. As most readers won't be able to read Hebrew, it may be difficult to recognise which is the main form and which are the child forms; the form with three grids is the main form.