Monday, September 11, 2006

Sinergia Expressions

Sinergia Help Desk has been designed to support customization at the data level. Part of this customization support involves the capacity to determine group, and field properties, dinamically. For example whether a custom field is required in a certain workflow state, or when the case is edited by some user in a specific role, like say "Administrator".

Sinergia supports expressions to calculate group, and field properties dinamically. The properties that can be defined using expressions are: Required, Read Only, Visible, and Default Value.

Sinergia Help Desk

This "expressions" are in fact expected to be C# code, plus a set of additional keywords targeted to simplify the expressions development. For example the [STATUS] identifier references (as the name implies), the state the case is in. Other expressions are [TODAY], and [NOW], which are usefull to define default values.

The expressions run in a context that has available the Session , User, and CaseData objects, which in my opinion allow for very powerfull expressions.

If I wanted to define a field as required always I can just put true, in the required expr textfield (is case sensitive remeber that).

If I wanted to check on the subject, to define the visible property, I could reference it using: [CASE].Subject, and if I want to make sure some word appears on the subject I could do something like this: [CASE].Subject.IndexOf("Whatever") != -1

Each expression textfield has a tick image button to validate the expression defined.

Sinergia C# Help Desk To try this feature you should go to the Administer Case Types, Administrator menu option, and edit one line of the grid with the edit icon (the one like a notebook).

You can download the latest bits, or you can try this in the demo here.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Sinergia online demo

In a time limited trial experience, I'm hosting a demo version of Sinergia at http://sinergia.dnsdojo.com/sinergia/web.

Before you try it, I'd like to clarify two things. The first, the host server may be down at times. If you want to make use of it and it's down, you may contact me and I'll bring it up. The second, the Administration features, are meant to be used in an intranet scenario, where the response times, are much better than these.

Having said this, I hope you enjoy it. As usual, feedback is welcomed.

Sinergia 0.3.6 released

The weekly drop of Sinergia is out, and running. I'm very excited about some of the new features that ship with this version, in particular the new expressions support.

The release notes are:

1- Sinergia Expressions Support in Case Type definitions. Now it is possible to define expressions for calculating visible, read only, required, and default value field properties. This is just the title, I expect to post an article on the subject soon.
2- Integrated create new user wizard, to the login page.

I know that some of you are having issues to setup the product, If you experience any problem don't hesitate to contact me.