Let It Scroll

For some time now I have been meaning to work on the various memo fields in ZonePro so that you could scroll the fields without having to edit the record. I'm referring to the Notes fields and other fields that accept unlimited input and have a scroll bar down the right side to view entries larger than the field box on the screen. Two recent events put an end to my procrastinating. First, it turns out that our new feature that allows you to lock the second Notes field in certain screens also means that there is no way to scroll those fields. That's a problem. Second, the new logging option works best when you only use the "edit" option to actually make changes. Using edit just to scroll is inefficient at best. In the next release you will be able to scroll any memo field in ZonePro without having to edit the record. Adding this feature obviously changes the way these fields behave when you are not editing. But not all of the changes are welcome. If you click on a memo field you will see a cursor appear in the field whether you are editing or not. You can't do anything with the cursor like add or delete text unless you are editing, but I find the cursor misleading. I'm not happy about that but it's part of the trade off.

Better Logging and Blogging

Since the last release I have developed two major improvements to the logging options in ZonePro. As it was announced in our last newsletter, you could turn on the logging feature in ZonePro to keep track of changes in the major application databases, but it was an all or none proposition. In the next release you will be able to specifically choose which databases to log. So, for example, you could just log changes to the Violations database. The other major improvement is to the log statement itself. In the initial release each log record statement listed every field in the record being edited. So you could look at the log and tell who made a change to what database at what time of day but it would be very difficult to figure out what the actual change was. In the next release the log statement only contains references to the fields that were changed. Now you know exactly who changed what, when. The net result of these two changes is that the update log is much leaner and meaner. The goal for these changes was to make for more efficient synchronzing with a ZP Web site. The smaller the update log, the shorter the upload transfer time and the quicker the processing on the web. These changes also make the logging option much more useful, however, for customers who want to track who is making changes to a specific database.

Three New Tips On Our Web Site

Earlier this week I received a series of questions from Jeffery at Bessemer City, NC, concerning unusual things he wanted to do with the Photo Module. He wanted to move one of his existing photo folders to a larger drive and reset all of the relevant Photo records without having to edit each one. He wanted to link a Windows folder to a Property record so that he could access a group of files without having to link each one individually. Finally, he wanted to archive some of the older Photo records without having to manually delete each one. Can you do these things with the Photo Module? Why, yes. To find out how check out the three new Photo Module tips I just added to the Tips & Tricks page of our customer support web site.

Monthly Reports Posted

I just posted a new set of reports on the Downloads page of our web site. I posted three variations of a "Monthly" report. All three produce subtotals by the month. One report runs from Building Reports and one from Zoning Reports. Both of these use the Permit Date as the key date and must be sorted by that date to produce correct results. The third report runs from Fee Collection Reports and uses Date Paid as the key date. These reports make good year-end summary or quarterly summary kind of reports. They are also good examples of reports that work well with the "Printer Summary" output option so that only the summary bands print, which basically gives you one line per month. These reports were simple to make, I just took the existing "Subsort" reports for each of those screens and changed the Group By expression to MONTH(cert_date). You can easily replicate this kind of report for any of the other report screens.