CreasindoID Rebuild - Part 1

Well ..... programming and coding again as usual ... . I'm going to rebuild my first complex program, CreasindoID (or Creasindo Kependudukan in Bahasa Indonesia). The rebuild process has started yesterday, and i thought that it would take about 2 or 3 weeks to be completed. The process includes ; reprogamming some little aspects of the main program, the modules, printing methods and ofcourse, the display and visualization of the program.

Yesterday, i started the process by rebuilding the MDI Form of the main program. The objects that have been redesigned were the menus and toolbars. The old MDI had 5 main menus, all in Bahasa Indonesia, so i extended it into 6 main menus. I thought that many users have been recognized with the look of some microsoft programs, such as Word or Excel, so i changed the language to English (in order to avoid the confusion with the words like "Dokumen" or "Opsi" - "File" and "Option" in english - because Bahasa Indonesia lacks most of the words related to IT ). But ofcourse, the sub menus were still in Bahasa Indonesia, so the users would not be confused with the functions of the program.

The toolbar was extended also. Now it has about 21 buttons on it (compared with the previous, which only had 10 buttons). The new looks provided, includes the icons of the buttons and the menus. Now, i use some icons of OsenXP instead of Mindjet ones (the icons were cute and have different kinds of type, depends on the functions ).

 

(Above ) Previous MDI and (Below) the New MDI

About the program system, i still use the previous one with some new improvements. The unload query function now takes place in the main program (MDI Form, not in the system module). One of the new functions of the main system might be the dialog window. I redesign a new dialog box, that contains some blank labels, 2 blank buttons, blank caption and Icon. The dialog box will be controlled by events of the program. eg, if the user wants to close the program, the unload query will trigger the dialog box. Some properties will be sent by the event (Labels, Images, Icon, size, etc) in order to control the looks of the blank dialog box. So i don't have to create another dialog box to display confirmation. Just give the required properties of the dialog box, then it will appeared in many ways, depends on the functions and properties which it's received.

 

The main problem was the positioning of some objects in the dialog window. I spent about 2-3 hours just to deal with the algorithms of objects positions. I was a little confused by the top, left, height and width property of the objects, but finally it solved.

 

The last addition of the program was welcome screen. It took about 1 hour to design the wellcome screen with adobe photoshop. The welcome screen included prologues to guide users for using the program. It also provided some shortcuts to the main functions, such as New Data, Open Data, and KTP Printing (Only New Data shortcut could be processed so far).

Today, i will improve the data system of the main program. For visualization and data outlining , i'll use VSFGrid 8.0, since it has huge advantages than the normal ms grid. Now, The problem is ... I've never used it before ... hahahaha ...