Yesterday I had to quickly generate some reports for my general manager. Two of them were no-brainers, just a straight read from a table and dumping out the data in a PDF. The third was a little more complicated, or so I thought.
It took me a while to finally decide on a name for this post. In my ExplorerG3 Agency Management System I need to access several databases depending on the type of insurance coverage a client has. Before, I had a separate search page for each type of policy, in this case automobile or anything other than automobile. This is not so bad if you are just looking through one type of policy, but it requires maintaining several search pages and any time I make a change I need to update them all. I would rather update one file and be done with it.
Well, the last few days I have been playing with getting Galleon2 up and running. Little projects like these are probably my favorite, ripping about someone's code to see how they make it do what it does just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Looking through the Galleon2 code I noticed how heavily it depends on the ObjectFactory to create the individual components that make everything run. I also realized that my main application, ExplorerG3, is sitting back somewhere in the 90's. Needless to say, I decided to "modernize" my first application.
Starting with my most heavily used app is probably not the best of ideas but I cannot think of a better place to start. A lot of the things it appears the components do are things I have already begun. Instead of relying on components, I have a rats nest of UDFs that encapsulate most of the actual work, so hopefully I have already taken the first step.
Since most of the people I annoy on a daily basis are off to MAX2007, I guess it will give me something to occupy my time over the weekend and some of next week.
