Jon Box

There are so many cool things that can be done with .NET applications today, including extending their reach. In Part 1 of this series we looked at the technology and tools used to add mobile accessibility to Web applications using as an example Quilogy's system, which utilizes ASP.NET Mobile Controls, known as the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit (MMIT) before VS.NET 2003. This month we will examine using Mobile Controls to access accounting, financial, and other information

Wireless Financials
One of the biggest benefits of Mobile MyQ is the ability to access accounting and financial information. Considering our flat, yet distributed, management structure, retrieving key performance indicators from anywhere and at any time is critical to a company in this economy.

In this area, we decided to buy instead of build. Therefore, we chose to work with Great Plains, a leading accounting software vendor. Although we have never directly used this accounting software, some of the MyQ pages are based on its data. For example, Figure 1 shows an accounting menu as seen on the Pocket PC. Each of the options is a function of eEnterprise, the Great Plains product used by Quilogy.

When retrieving information from a system, it is always beneficial to filter information based on the user's wishes, especially when considering processing time, transmission time, and the memory constraints of a small device. For example, consider the second menu option, PL Statement, which generates a Profit and Loss report. When selecting this option, the user is presented with selection criteria that will create a useful report specific to the manager's search. This criteria includes year, month, and location. Figures 2­4 show this selection page rendered by the Pocket PC Emulator, Microsoft Mobile Emulator, and the Ericsson emulator, respectively.

This page uses the SelectionList control from ASP.NET Mobile Controls for the Year, Month, and Location selections. Notice how it works differently on the three emulators ­ specifically notice the location selection. This is an illustration of one of the core benefits of using ASP.NET Mobile Controls. With no extra effort by the developer, the control knows how to interact with the device. The Pocket PC gives us a normal-looking dropdown list box. The Microsoft Mobile Explorer gives us a display that shows how a device would use softkeys. The Ericsson emulator gives us a control that is similar to a listbox.

One interesting note here is that the Accounting menu shown previously is rendered differently based on the capability of the device. In this case, the Ericsson device would not have Billable Hours and Industry Chart (the third and fourth menu items). This is because these reports display dynamically created images and a typical cell phone will not have a markup language that supports this feature. As a result, we took advantage of ASP.NET Mobile Controls' ability to programmatically detect device capabilities to modify the menu.

Figure 5 shows the results of the Billable Hours and Industries report pages (with artificial data in this case). The ability to pull this type of graphical presentation should please Pocket PC users. For ASP.NET developers, the ability to create images programmatically is supported in the .NET Framework. This also applies to the ASP.NET Mobile Controls environment since it simply extends an ASP.NET application.

Other Controls of Note
There are a good number of controls that ASP.NET Mobile Controls provides; however, several are worth a quick mention.

Related Links

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