Work Order Attachment Viewer

From idea to action!

This might sound familiar to anyone who’s been around E1/JDE for a while. And if you’ve pondered why the development client’s desktop icon is a light-bulb, then here it is. The light-bulb represents the idea.

It’s a good slogan so I’m reviving here to describe how a client’s idea resulted in an AIS web app.

The idea

The client uses imaging extensively to record the equipment condition as work order attachments. With dozen or even hundreds of images, viewing them in E1/JDE is cumbersome.

So the idea was to display image attachments in a browser, album style. The user enters the work order number and receives all images as thumbnails that open up full size when clicked on.

Action

The tool-set does not have controls for this functionality so any form based solution would need some ‘hacking’, with the risk of being unsatisfactory or ending up in the too-hard bin.

Album functionality is however almost native to a browser and AIS can return attachment list with thumbnails. So an AIS web app solution sounds ideal.

Design

An AIS web app is essentially an extension of E1/JDE form. This enforces a very powerful design principle. An AIS web or mobile app’s design is inherently based on decades of a proven E1/JDE form design. This might not be initially obvious, but once you start to build AIS apps the benefits become apparent.

Using the Roadmap template, we can define the Business Process, Flow and Integration.

Business Process – Objective

Display work order details, child work orders and attachments.

Flow – What

• Enter work order number and display its details along with child work orders.

• Display thumbnail attachments for a selected work order.

• Open full size image for a selected thumbnail.

Integration – How

• Fetch work order details from W17714A.

• Fetch child work orders from W48201F.

• Fetch attachments from GT4801A.

The solution is scoped by the Business Process and Integration. Even though AIS has functionality that’s not available in the tool-set, the business process is still defined by what you can do in E1/JDE. In this case open a work order, list child work orders and open attachments.

Finally we design the Flow within the scope of the Business Process and Integration.

Above is the resulting single-page-app.

Lessons learned

• Stick to the scope of a defined Business Process in E1/JDE.

• Prototype and get users involved early (release early & release often philosophy).

• Keep the interface simple.

• Structure the logic (E1NgStart).

• Don’t fear binning logic and start again.

• Upgrade the solution at least once every six months to avoid major rework.

This solution has now been in production for over a year with a recent upgrade to Angular 5 and Celin’s E1NgStart.