InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Tom on 2010/09/27 13:19

I'm wondering if IQ is suitable for keeping track of orders and items ordered in a small shop scenario?

In this small shop, orders are made roughly once a fortnight.

I was wondering how this might be approached in IQ.

Let's say that all items that will be ordered are added to IQ as new items, now, how would one approach the orders?

Each time an item is ordered, it could get a new parent - the order - this would lead to huge number of parents though. Would that work?

I have a similar scenario myself but the scale is completely different.

Drawing A is drawn for Invoice 100. Drawing A is made a sub-item of new Item Invoice #100.
Drawing A is reworked at a later date - it becomes a sub-item of new Invoice #105
Drawing A is reworked yet again at a later date - it becomes a sub-item of a new Invoice#108 etc. etc.

Drawing A now has three Invoice related parents (and other parents to locate it elsewhere). As I say this works because of the small scale (currently with a maximum of 5 or six parents)

Do you think it could work when an item has 100 parents and more?

Can you think of a better approach?!?

Comments

I would organize this in a more traditional:

Client
- Order
  - item

and a Product grid (ID, name, unit price)

Using forms for Client, Order and item, and use the Add new sub-item buttons in the form

The item would have a Product name dropdown, which would get its list from a Products grid. You can fill many fields at once using a dropdown (ID, product name, price, etc)

Price would have both a row equation (qty * unit price) and a column equation (sum)

The main drawback, is the lack of referential integrity between the item info in an order and the list of products, but often, this integrity is causing more problems than anything else

Pivot tables, grid grouping, filters and Excel export can all be used to perform analysis / statistics / total

So, the bottom line is IQ is very well suited for this

> the bottom line is IQ is very well suited for this

Thanks Pierre, that's good to hear :-)

Havent used the dropdown related to contents of another grid - will have to try it out

I will probably have more questions about this (but in the future!)

Assign multiple field values at once to a Pop-up list using items from another grid

I'm confused about what info the new popup field gets filled with

Here's the source grid - (only partially filled in so far)

Here below is the other grid with Producktname as the popup field which fills in *all* the other fields

Now I'm confused about the new popup field (Producktname) - what should that get filled with ??

In this example, it gets filled with the Item field text, but if I change the details, again via popup, the text in Producktname field doesnt change - here it remains as 'Cafe Organico gem'.

Would this be better:

In the source grid (Produckte) have a 'Name' field for the name (of the coffee in this example) - I dont know what I'd use item field for then (leave it blank maybe?)

In the 'destination' grid have 'Name' as the first field that gets copied by the Producktname field - hence Producktname would be filled with the text from the Name field.

Again I'd probably be better off leaving the item field blank (? - have never done that before so unsure)

EDIT // or should I simply be using the same field in both grids ???

(have I misunderstood the concept...)

[quote=Tom]

EDIT // or should I simply be using the same field in both grids ???

(have I misunderstood the concept...)

[/quote]

I'm not sure have I misunderstood the concept or not, but this does seem to be the best solution at any rate.

The manual is not clear to me - I followed the manual page, pretty closely I thought, but as you see I ran into a fair bit of trouble

-- link to nonexistent node ID 294 --

other problems I had - could have been related to my flawed (?) approach

1. all fields listed for the popup field seem to have to be displayed in the source grid - I suppose logical enough if the case

2. cant use a field with a space - is that a bug? (I've lost track of that - are fields with spaces still taboo?)