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Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 08:05:18 +1000
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 <CAG=ut6JmnF10ug5YVzEhmKjMgAZeweH6SEZf0mWKbXhWVXPk=w@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: add-on ideas
From: Stephen Cameron <steve.cameron.62@gmail.com>
To: users@isis.apache.org
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Hello Isis users,

Just want to mention some ideas that have come up via discussions with
client.

Sticky Notes / Reminders

The small application I am building is essentially a Client Relationshp
Management (CRM) system. A big part of it is to schedule interactions
(mainly just phone calls) to clients into the future and to allocate those
to specific volunteers. I'm now interested to make use of the existing
to-do demo app as part of my project. I've had the idea of making this
generic so it can be used anywhere to add sticky notes that refer to one or
more domain objects, Its an extension of the bookmark idea essentially.

Forms Design.

My client is interested to still have some paper forms, and when this
subject comes up I always think one aspect of DDD is ultimately to let
domain experts change their own models.

Maybe this is why MS Access and Excel are so dominant? Also, why people,
when a system doesn't provide all their needs, find work-arounds that
usually involve private spreadsheets as secondary data stores. I have seen
a few of those in the past week.

So, a legitimate question that arises is "Will we be able to change it or
do we need to pay an expert?". Being such an expert who wants to be paid
its easy to say, "sorry you cannot change it, but with Apache Isis its not
that costly to add changes, in fact its desirable to do so (so you don't
end up using spreadsheets)".

Getting to the point, a specific challenge is these paper forms, should the
client maintain a Word Document version and a web-based data entry version?
Its the same data-model, but the Word Document can be changed by the client
and the web-based forms not. Given that web-forms can have a print
stylesheet associated with them, this seems a sad situation to me.

This is an old chestnut for me, and now again it comes up. I'd like to try
solving it in Apache Isis. With its meta-model and via use of an EAV
database design, or a graph database maybe, this seems possible.

One other solution I have seen is just to add some 'generic' properties
into the data model entities, that the user can make use of to add things
as they think of them. Periodically these can be properly renamed (by an
expert), but it does allow the user to add simple things on the fly.

Regards
Steve Cameron

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