I am converting a VFP project to SF and I have one form which handles several related tables on a pageframe in which each page handles one table in this order Parent->Child->Child.

Basically the Parent table is "InsuredCustomer" and Policy, Vehicle, Driver are all related to the parent.

I am thinking in building an SF form with a TreeView, but would like to here from some of you about suggestions on how to build this kind of form.

Please take a look a these sample screens:

I think that your idea of using a TreeView is a good one.  This would be a very good location to use a TreeView.  You can then use it in conjunction with a PanelManager for each of the individual pages.  This is an approach that we use often and it is very effective.

One thing that we have learned, especally from questioning our customers, is that they do not particularlly like page frames...so the better that we mask this and can present in a cleaner format the better...using a TreeView and a PanelManager is one of the solutions that we have used.

I agree with you in using a TreeView control here, now the question is which one?

I had experience using DBI-Tech ActiveX controls in my VFP applications, I have not make my decision on what product suite to buy for my .NET projects.  I have seen several messages here about DevExpress and believe SF support them somehow.

1. So by supporting a 3rd party tools what does it really means from SF view?
2. Which specific controls are supported by SF?
3. Also, is there any Reporting Tool that SF supports in order to re-use SF Business Objects?

We actually had this same control collection in our VFP application...it was nice moving away from this once we got to .NET.

Nothing really.  You can use any third party tool that you want to.  The important thing here is that it is a managed .NET control.  You do not want to use an interoped ActiveX control when you can avoid it.  There are going to be many times, which this would be one, that the 3rd party control is not going to have a bearing one way or the other regarding StrataFrame.  You are going to be manually loading a TreeView anyway and as long as it is a .NET managed control, you will be good.

I think that part of this was answered in your first question.  Use can use any third party control with SF.  You can either implement the IBusinessBindable interface to an inherited control...or just use the BusinessBindingSource to use native .NET databinding to a 3rd party control with no additional code.

In this case, however, you are referring to a TreeView which you will not be binding to in any fashion really.  Here you will be populating a treeview and storing off a custom structure or class in a Tag property of the node so that when a node is clicked you have all of the details of that node (incuding the primary key of the record the node represents, the type, etc.) so you can take the proper action.

We recently sent out an email regarding this topic.  We really only recommend one reporting tool out there as we spent a lot of time researching this and looking through all of the available options.  The one we landed on was Report Sharp-Shooter.  We have implemented this report engine in our medical software and have been VERY pleased.  You can learn more about their product at www.perpetuumsoft.com .

We will be posting a sample specific to this report engine when we release our new KB.

Hi Trent,

Thanks for the information.  The whole idea is to invest in 3rd party control which are more compatible with the main tool in this case SF.  I am making a deep commintment and investment in SF and therefor would like to do the same with the 3rd party tools I need.  Like I said before, I am a huge fan of DBI activex controls due to their compatibility with VFP, I don't know about their .NET version of those controls, yet.  I seen many messages here about DevExpress grids and at some point I believe I may need such a display in any of my projects.

About the Report Shart-Shooter, I did not get that email.  Do you have any idea when the sample will be available in your KB?  or if they it will take a couple of week to release the KB and you can email me any sample during the week I would really appreciate it.

There are other collections out there too: Janus, SyncFusion, etc.  I like the people at SyncFusion and all of my encounters with them have been positive...but I am not as familiar with their collection.

Infragistics and DevExpress are safe bets and each collection has things about it that I like.  The Infragistics grid is extremely deep and can pretty much do anything that you can come up with...the DevExpress good but I think that the Infragistics grid wins that competition overall.  Infragistics has App Themes, but I prefer the way the DevExpress LookAndFeel work....though the DevExpress LookAndFeel became very slow on large forms.  So we try not to use any 3rd party controls for the basic and use SF themes for our application and them bring in the outlier controls such as grids, etc. and use our themes with those controls by using all of the color properties to get what we want.

I am referring to our KB.  We are going to be releasing a KB in April.  I have not created the larger sample yet and I will not be able to get anything like this done this week.  I have this on my to-do list and when I create the sample I will post it here on the forum so you can look at it.