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WK6CM1.TXT
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1996-04-04
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Week 6 course material
Liberty BASIC programming course
Copyright 1996 Shoptalk Systems
All Rights Reserved
Files included with this lesson
==============================================================================
WK6CM1.TXT - This file
TRACKER.BAS - The finished solution to our week 6 project
LETTER.BMP - These five files are used as icons in our application
CALL.BMP
BROCHURE.BMP
SALE.BMP
DEADEND.BMP
LETTER.TXT - An example letter of introduction for our application
PACKSLIP.TXT - An example packing slip for our application
Building Our Application
==============================================================================
We now arrive at the final stage of our Liberty BASIC course. We will build
a kind of personal information manager for managing sales calls. Our
application will manage an address list. Each sales lead in the list will
have a field containing an event status for our sales effort. Here is a list
of events for each sales lead:
- Letter of Introduction
- Follow-Up Phone Call
- Brochure
- Sale
- Dead End Lead
Our application will provide a means of printing the Letter of Introduction,
personalized with each name and also dated. We will launch NOTEPAD.EXE to
edit our form letter, and we will used tags (like <nameTag> and <dateTag>)
to insert the name and date where desired. See the included example file
LETTER.TXT. When we have printed a Letter of Introduction for any record,
its event status will automatically advance to Follow-Up Phone Call.
When making our Follow-Up Phone Call, our application will let us specify
if there was:
- no contact, try later
- positive contact, send brochure
- negative contact, dead end lead
When we have had positive contact, the event status of the record will
be advanced to brochure.
When the sale is made, we will print a packing slip using a technique
similar to the one we will use for printing our letter of introduction.
See the included example file PACKSLIP.TXT.
Here is a functional description of our application:
1) Main window - When the program is started, a window will open with the
following controls:
a) A combobox with a list of events (letter, call, brochure, etc).
When we select an event in this control, our application code
will fill our listbox below c) with leads that have the selected
event status.
b) A graphicbox for displaying an icon that represents the selection
in our combobox above a). This is similar to our week 5 homework.
c) A listbox for holding the names of sales leads. We will want to
select a name from this list to perform actions on.
d) A statictext to describe what possible action we can take on a
lead we select in our listbox above c).
e) A button to invoke the action described in our statictext d).
So if we want to work on making phone calls, we select 'call' from the
combobox a). The graphicbox b) displays our call.bmp file, and listbox c)
fills up with leads that have an event status of 'call'. The statictext
d) displays 'Make Call'. Then we select a lead from the listbox c) and
click on button e) and another window opens to present the information we
need to make the call. Assuming the call is a success, we provide a way
to register this in our application, and the event status of this sales
lead record is advanced to 'brochure'.
Our main window will also need buttons for the following:
a) New Lead - Open a window for entering a new record. Each record
has these fields:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Address 1
- Address 2
- City
- State
- Zip
- Phone #
- Comment
- Event Status (not user editable)
- Date of Last Action (not user editable)
b) Edit/View Lead - Open a window to view or edit a record. The fields
are the same as above.
c) Edit Letter - Run NOTEPAD.EXE to edit a letter of introduction
d) Edit Packslip -Run NOTEPAD.EXE to edit a packing slip
Try out TRACKER.BAS
==============================================================================
To get a good feel for how the application should work, try the included
TRACKER.BAS program file. Notice how we use dialog boxes, most of them
modal dialog boxes. See how we run NOTEPAD.EXE to edit our templates for
our letter of introduction and our packing slip.
Because this is a large project, it might be helpful for you to take a
good look at the TRACKER.BAS file. Running the debugger on it might also
be a good idea. Then once you have a good idea how things work, start
writing your own code.
File Input/Output
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The sales lead records are loaded when the program is started into an
array 500 by 12. This will work with 500 records (an arbitrary limit).
The first line in our file is a count of the number of records in the file.
Each record's fields are stored one to a line, and LINE INPUT is used to read
them in so that commas can be included in a field's text. When we quit the
program, the records are saved back to disk.
Listboxes
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The listbox is similar to the combobox we used in our week 5 homework. It
fills itself with the contents of an array named in its originating
statement, like so:
listbox #main.list, names$(, 10, 10, 100, 250
In the statement above, the listbox will fill itself with the contents of
they array named names$(), which must be single dimensioned. Whenever the
contents of the listbox need to change, the RELOAD command is used, like
so:
print #main.list, "reload"
Printing the letter of introduction and packing slip
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Text is sent to the printer using the LPRINT statement. The following will
send Hello World to the printer:
lprint "Hello World"
dump 'force the end of page
The DUMP statement forces the end of page, which is what you will want to do
each time you print a letter of introduction or print a packing slip.