get a little help with your help desk application

Copyright © 2006-2011. Iron Speed Inc. All rights reserved. www.ironspeed.com

Building a Help Desk Application

Moderator: Jill Giampedraglia

Presenter: Kirill Dmitriev

We will start momentarily…

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Copyright © 2006-2011. Iron Speed® Inc. All rights reserved. www.ironspeed.com

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What is Covered in this Course

How Schema Design Affects Application Generation by Iron Speed Designer

What is Help Desk Application?

Building Help Desk Application

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To get most of Iron Speed Designer prepare your database first!

Iron Speed Designer uses database schema to create pages

Pages layout and functionality are driven by schema

Application performance depends on your schema

Properly designed schema is easy extendable

To create web application with Iron Speed Designer no

knowledge of code, ASPX or other .NET concepts required but

knowledge of database schemas, foreign keys, and SQL is

helpful

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No repeating information: Use index tables

Less fields in table – more efficient

Normalize Schema

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Create Child Tables for 1-to-Many Relationships

Child tables are used to create

Master-detail (parent-child) pages

Child table examples

Orders.CustomerID Customers.CustomerID (one customer may have many orders)

OrderDetails.OrderID Orders.OrderID (one order may have many line items)

DBAs call this ‘normalizing your database’

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Create Separate Lookup Tables

Lookup tables are used to create

Dropdown lists for data entry

Display Foreign Key As

Lookup table examples

Order.ShipperID Shipper.ShipperID (choose order shipping method: FedEx, UPS, USPS)

Displays “Shipped Via FedEx” (instead of “Shipped Via 3”)

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Index! Index all Foreign keys, Primary keys and any fields you

search by or filter by

Full text index is not supported.

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Naming conventions

Use meaningful names: they are used by Iron Speed Designer to create labels

Use Camel Case! Iron Speed Designer can parse names based on capitalization: ContactID -> Contact; UserName -> User Name

File name: use Companion field to specify a file name for File upload. See Designer\ConfigurationOptions.xsl

Singular and Plural: helps to create proper names for pages: CategoriesTable instead of CategoryTable

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Fields Data Types

Using correct data type helps Designer to generate proper controls

If your string field is supposed to hold not more then 20 symbols limit its length to 20 (nvarchar(20))

If your field can have only two values, use bit type

Use image type for images rather than binary

Use money rather than decimal for currency

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Create Database Views for Complex Queries Create Database views for

Multi-table joins

Complex queries: distinct, not, nested queries

Create via Microsoft Enterprise Manager or similar tool

Designer treats database views just like database tables

Database view examples

Current quarter sales (query filters based on time)

Paid invoices (query filters based on status field)

Iron Speed Designer is not a query construction tool !

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Declare Primary Keys in your Database

Primary keys are used to create

Show Record pages

Edit Record pages

Edit Table pages

Primary key relationship examples

Orders.OrderID

Shipper.ShipperID

Not permitted to modify your database?

Create a Virtual Primary Key in Iron Speed Designer

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Declare Foreign Keys in your Database

Foreign keys are used to create

Master-detail (parent-child) pages

Every Designer-built page can be a master-detail page!

Pages with data from multiple tables (multi-table joins)

Display Foreign Key As

To construct Joins for charts, sums, counts and filters

Foreign key relationship examples

OrderDetails.OrderID Orders.OrderID

Orders.ShipperID Shipper.ShipperID

Not permitted to modify your database?

Create a Virtual Foreign Key in Iron Speed Designer

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Create Virtual Foreign Keys in DesignerUse VFKs if you can’t add a foreign key in your database

Used to create Master-Detail pages & Display Foreign Key As

Go to: Application Wizard’s Keys step OR Databases New

Virtual Foreign Key…

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What is Help Desk Application?

Help Desk = Support

Facing customers – support application

Facing Company = portion of CRM

CRM = Customer relationship management

Manage all interactions with customers:

• Sales

• Support

• Marketing

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CRM: Sales Management

Manage orders and invoices

Create workflow to process new customers and orders

Manage products and services

Get sales statistics and reports

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CRM: Support (Help Desk)

Manage technical support cases• Update case

• Update case status

• By Engineer by Customer

• Integrate with Customer’s account

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CRM: Marketing

Advertising partners statistics and management

Clicks and/or orders counts

Campaigns management

Emails management

Perspective customers management

Other reports and graphs

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Customer Support

Customer account management• Create new, update existing

• Merge / split accounts

• Add / remove products

Notes / document management• Customer’s feedback

• Internal notes

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Benefits of CRM

Decrease in operational costs• Effective account management and tracking

• Effective product management

Increase in revenue• Effective marketing campaigns management

Decision making support• Statistics and reports

Customer satisfaction• Better customer support

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Building Help Desk with Iron Speed Designer?

Select all tables and create pages• Iron Speed Designer creates all pages and all functionality

• Add security via Designer and application is done!

Only thing is missing…

Usability!

Your work is to delete unnecessary pages and clean interface

• Define your main entry point

• Define menus

• Define for each task how it should be done

• Add formulas and charts

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Tips and tricks

Add hyperlink to drill down on count• = IF(ParseInteger(LOOKUP(OrdersCountQuery,

EmployeeID))=0," ", "<a href='../Orders/ShowOrdersTable.aspx?EmployeeID="+EmployeeID+"' >"+Format(LOOKUP(OrdersCountQuery, EmployeeID), "#,###")+"</a>")

Add Audit CreatedOn = Now(); CreatedBy = UserID()

Use edit / show / add buttons for index tables rather than direct menu.

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Tips and tricks

Create pages for one page, see what you want to change and adjust Application Generation Options before creating other pages.

To add child detail tables to a record below in tab first drop them inside the record and then cut and paste.

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Create an Application: Application Wizard

Go to: Tools Application Wizard… OR

Files New Application…

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Questions?

get a little help with your help desk application

Technology

database foreign keys

database primary keys

virtual foreign keys

designer use vfks

pages pages layout

use index tables

record pages

virtual primary key