The Needed Adaptability for ERP Systems - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 207

Figure 6. Interface framework

which acts like a copy of the current screen, yet
on a design interface (similar to Visual Basic), as
shown in Figure 6. This screen is totally managed
by the VFP's base events: MouseDown , MouseUp
and Click events.
This design interface makes it possible to hide
the standard objects (textbox, combo box, buttons,
grids, etc) and to add new objects (which will
present data, perform standard actions or even
XBase code), as shown in the toolbars (Figure 7).
When the design phase is finished, only the
changes (left, top, width, height and visible prop-
erties) will be saved on the database for the stan-
dard objects and the new objects created. Figure
8 presents the new tables created to support this
new functionality.
The implementer can also define if a cus-
tomization is associated to a specific user or
professional role in the company. When the user
opens a screen/interface, the software validates if
there is any customization associated to his name
or professional role. If so, it loads the related
customizations, it opens the standard screen and
applies the changes (modifications on standard
objects and new custom objects).

Such functionality allows organizations that
will only present the information they wish to
their collaborators. It also promotes scalability,
since it makes it possible for new user fields and
user tables to be added and made available on the
Database framework.
As a final note, the “Load Screen Objects (run-
time)” task has revealed a lower performance for
complex forms (with a high number of objects).
The major causes are the recursive routines
developed to analyze all the existing objects on
container objects (such as page frames and grids).
An effective solution to reduce the overall time
of loading objects in run-time is that all informa-
tion should be summarized locally (inside the
executable file)!
Routines have been developed to analyze all
forms/screens during the compilation time; this
action was possible since VFP keeps all program-
ming components (forms, programs, reports,
etc) as local tables. So, before compilation, all
programming components are “open” and objects
are retrieved to a local table; this operation takes
almost 30 minutes more to read than 150 screens,
which drastically decreases the compilation time.