– WebGrid.NET 6.0 with its new ability to present data visualization concept by introducing pivot charting and classic paging mechanism.

– WebDragDropExtender.NET as a new member of WebDesktop.NET 2.5, enabling user to add sophisticated drag and drop behaviors to existing server or html controls.

– WebTreeView.NET 1.0 as the latest of Intersoft’s ASP.NET server control, enabling user to easily create a hierarchical data presentation.

Following are the latest video’s URL of each component:

WebGrid.NET 6.0
http://support.intersoftpt.com/Video.aspx?pid=144&topic=General

WebDragDropExtender.NET
http://support.intersoftpt.com/Video.aspx?pid=136&topic=WebDragDropExtender

WebTreeView.NET 1.0
http://support.intersoftpt.com/Video.aspx?pid=152&topic=General

You can also look at the other videos at Intersoft Solutions – Support Center.

Should you guys have any feedback or request for the current and future videos, please feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Thank you.

Cheers.

The complete list of fixed issues will be included in November 07’s version history. You can check it out in Support site. However, November 07’s build and version history would not be available until the end of this month.

Live Demo site has already been updated too. The latest builds are now used in live demo site. Several samples have been modified to prevent changes to be saved to database.

Cheers,
Erika

Powerful data analysis and visualization with simple implementation

Hi all, I’m going to brief about the latest feature in WebGrid.NET Enterprise® 6.0 which called Pivot Charting. By definition Pivot Charting is a powerful data analysis and visualization tool that enables you to present your dataset in multiple viewpoints.

Don’t confuse it with more complex business intelligent application such as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 analysis. The featured offered in WebGrid.NET Enterprise® 6.0 is a more simplified approach more like Microsoft Access 2007®.

Pivot Charting is not enabled by default. You’ll need to perform several steps to enable it.

1. Bind the WebGrid with a datasource. This datasource can be from a raw data retrieved using simple SELECT command, or a report data retrieved using complex query.
   
2. After you bind the WebGrid with a datasource, the next thing to do is to decide how you would like your view mode. There are three types of mode available:
   

   
   Allow Pivot Charting (with initial view = Grid View / Pivot Chart View)
   Allow Pivot Charting means that you will have an option to switch between GridView and PivotChartView

   WebGrid1.LayoutSettings.InitialView = GridInitialView.GridView;
   WebGrid1.AllowPivotCharting = true;

   
   Pivot Chart View Exclusive
   Pivot Chart View exclusive means that the WebGrid will show only Pivot Chart View, you won’t be able to switch between views with this view mode.

   WebGrid1.LayoutSettings.InitialView = ISNet.WebUI.WebGrid.GridInitialView.PivotChartViewExclusive;

   Both View
   Both view means that you can show both Grid View and Pivot Chart View at the same time.

   WebGrid1.LayoutSettings.InitialView = ISNet.WebUI.WebGrid.GridInitialView.Both;
   WebGrid1.LayoutSettings.ChartDisplayPosition = ISNet.WebUI.WebGrid.ChartPosition.Top;

With just these two steps now you already have a Pivot Charting feature in your application.

Let say you use the following settings:

WebGrid’s data source : Northwind [Order Details]
WebGrid’s Initial View : PivotChartViewExclusive

You’ll get something like this:

Done! You’ve created your first basic Pivot Charting application. This view is still meaningless, since no data / settings are applied. Let’s start dragging some Field to drop zones.

1. Drag and drop OrderID to Drop Data zone.
2. Drag and drop EmployeeID to Drop Category zone.
3. Drag and drop OrderDate (Years) to Drop Series zone.
4. Try filtering the data based on EmployeeID by clicking the “down arrow” at EmployeeID’s Pivot Object.

Note that you can also specify this settings programmatically, so at start up the user will be shown this chart automatically.

That’s all for now, in the next post I’ll discuss more about built-in features in Pivot Charting.

Check the updated tutorial videos for WebDesktop.NET and WebCombo.NET from the following link respectively:

WebDesktop
http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=93&type=Videos

WebCombo
http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=109&type=Videos

Please feel free to submit any feedback or request for future tutorial videos in this post. Maybe we can go further to create a more advanced videos for intermediate users. Thanks.

The upcoming WebDesktop.NET in 2007 R2 release will have several nice features added to WebDesktopManager component. One of them is shadow-mode resizing and moving. This was a feature that we have been thinking to implement for a while, and it is finally here.

In current release, the mode used by the window moving and resizing mechanism is called “Physical Interaction”. This means while you move or resize the window around, the real window will take affect in real time. This behavior is sometimes causing lagging when the content of the window is relatively complex and large. This mode also impact on slower performance when there are several opened windows in the desktop manager space. The slow performance is normal because browsers need to recalculate and re-render the window (IFrame) contents.

The new “Shadow Interaction” mode in v2.5 resolves several performance bottlenecks by creating a temporary shadow to indicate the current interaction. This means the physical window attributes won’t be applied after the mouse up event. In our test, this new mode introduces several advantages:

• Significantly faster performance while moving and resizing window. This is made possible because the heavy contents are not re-rendered during the interaction.
• 100% smooth and robust interaction even with a lot of IFrame-kind of window content. This means, the window can still be smoothly moved and resized eventhough it is on the top of other IFrame windows. This was one limitation in previous “physical interaction” mode.
• Avoided “resize bogus” and improved resizing  stability in Mozilla. Most components today extensively using onresize event to handle the layout and rendering when a container is being resized. The “physical interaction” is surely a performance killer because the onresize events that attached to the resized window will be called massively and continuously. This problem is nothing to worry with the new shadow interaction mode.

The following is a sample screenshot when the “Stocks Application” window is resized downward. 

This new feature is designed to help improving user experience, which was our focus for the upcoming 2007 R2 release. We would have some nice enhancements for WebDialogBox as well, such as animation support when open/close, transparency color, keep dialog box visible on scroll, and much more.

Best Regards,

Jimmy.

A while ago, I have posted about Cross IFRAMEs ability in our upcoming WebDragDropExtender component. As the development of this new component has finished, I decided to blog more about this new component to give you more understanding and impression about the features available in WebDragDropExtender.

In this post, I would like to share how this new component could be used together with other Intersoft’s components such as WebGrid and WebDesktop. During the final phase of the samples creation, our team has just realized how drag and drop could change the way user interacts with application. It’s just beautiful.

WebDragDropExtender is designed with high extensibility and customizability as its key objectives. For instance, it includes special integration with WebGrid and WebDesktop and extend drag-drop behaviors in a new way that never possible before. We can easily, let’s say, to mark a WebGrid component as dragable element with multiple-selection behavior. Next, we can define WebDesktopManager as the drop target element with drop behavior for its shortcut icons.

This enables end users to drag one or more items from WebGrid component (inside WebDesktopWindow), to shortcut icon of WebDesktopManager. To get a big picture of the results, let’s look at the following screenshot.

The above good-looking screenshot might lead you a question, how complex the implementation could be? As the first vendor who embrace this new innovation, certainly there were a lot of challenges. However, we tried our best to make drag-drop as easy-to-use as possible through solid object-based encapsulation, deep integration with Visual Studio and designers.

For example, take a look at the following code snippets and you will agree that the implementation is pretty straightforward, and most behaviors can be added easily via declaratively or programmatically:

<ISWebDesktop:WebDragDropExtender ID=”WebDragDropExtender1″ runat=”server”>
     <DragControls>
           <ISWebDesktop:WebDragControl AdvancedProperties=”Type=WebGrid,ShadowWidthMode
=FixedWidth,ShadowWidthValue=200″ ControlID=”gridEmployees” />
    </DragControls>
    <DropControls>
    <ISWebDesktop:WebDropControl ControlID=”dm1″ AdvancedProperties=”Type=WebDesktopManager,DropableOnShortcut=True,
DetectOverlappingObject=True,ActivateWindowOnTaskBarOver=True” />
    </DropControls>
    <ClientSideEvents OnDragOver=”DragOver” OnDragDrop=”DragDrop” />
</ISWebDesktop:WebDragDropExtender>

There are many other interesting features such as AJAX dragdrop server side event, Vista-style tooltip and visual indicator, complete client side events, drag-drop data validation, built-in cursor effects and more. More posts will follow. WebDragDropExtender will be part of WebDesktop 2.5, which will be released along with other new products in our 2007 R2 release.

As the next R2 release speaks, we are planning to deliver the first beta version on mid of June. The final release is expected to be available sometime in July (as of our original 2007 R2 schedule).

If you have questions or feedbacks around WebDragDropExtender, feel free to post your comments.

All the best,

Jimmy.

All the best,
Jimmy.

This post is probably the first impression of our future direction after our groundbreaking 2007 R1 release. I would like to share some cool features that we will implement for the 2007 R2 milestone. So in this early stage of development, please send us feedbacks and comments that you have in mind.

One great feature in our list is a robust, event-driven drag and drop framework. While there are tons of free drag and drop frameworks such as scriptalous, prototype, yahoo UI toolkit etc — all of them did not have what we want. That leads us to develop our own drag and drop architecture from the ground up.

One of the requirements that we need to have is the ability to perform drag and drop across IFRAMEs. Imagine that you have a WebDesktopManager with two windows using IFRAME content. Then you need the ability to drag a data from the first window to the second window. This is pretty common scenario in Windows application I guess, but this scenario is almost impossible to be done in Web application.

This is a big challenge that we will try to come up in 2007 R2. Our preliminary implementation shows that the drag and drop across IFRAMEs is possible with very robust event-messaging implementation. As an example, take a look at the following screenshot. Notice that the drag object will automatically dragable while the mouse pointer is crossing to the other WebDesktopWindow (which is using IFRAME content mode).

Besides cross IFRAME support, our drag and drop architecture will also be the first that provide Vista-style cursor-effect and tooltip. Notice the “Move to IFrameRight” visual hints in the above screenshot.

More directions and detailed roadmap for 2007 R2 will be published around early next week in Intersoft Developer Network. Ensure you log into Developer Network periodically and stay tuned with our new updates.

Regards,
Jimmy.