Advice from GUI Gurus

[jodyjay]

Hello there. I am brand new to this site so that I thought I get started with a question that's been puzzling me for some time.

At my work my boss has this Access database he uses to hold information on his customer payments. This is a fairly normalized database with a few tables.

However, about once a month directors from different regions send him spreadsheets with their own customer payments. Unfortunately, because this data is sent as an Excel spreadsheet his has to manually import every spreadsheet into his Access database in order to run his queries.

Out of frustration he has asked me to write him a small application that would allow him to run 2 queries, one off of his database and the other off his spreadsheet, and then merge the data together (similiar to a table join).

My problem is that he is very big on "point-and-click" and "ease-of-use" programs. Because he doesn't know SQL, and because I can't always be there to run his query for him, he wants a simple GUI that would allow him to pick the fields he wants, filter the data for him, and show the data in a simple format (I'm thinking a datagrid).

My Problem: Does anyone know of an way I can display his query on the screen. I'm able to allow him to pick the fields and filter them (pretty easy) but my problem is allowing him to pick the tables and have him select how the data is related together.

To help illustrate this I created a webpage. To view it please click here:

http://www.jccspat.org/drawing1/

I've tried using the TreeView control and ListView control, but I'm not happy with the way they look.

TreeView Control:
Query1
|
|_ tblClients
|_ tblClientPayments
|_ tblRegions
|
|_ Workbook_PaymentArchive


ListView Control:
Table1 Table2 Field Join
--------------------------------------------------------
tblClients tblClientPayments fldClientID Inner
tblClientPayments tblRegions fldRegionID Inner
tblRegions PaymentArchive fldRegionID Inner


Does anyone know of another way I can represent this? Are there any 3rd party controls out there that might help?

-jodyjay

 

[stsuing]

I would think the KISS solution is to get the data into the Access database in a automated way. That way your boss can use an application he's used to and you don't have to maintain one. If you record a macro when your boss manually imports the spreadsheet, you could modify that macro to import multiple files at once, and run on start up or when you boss clicks a button. You may have to take extra care not to import the same file twice.

I like programming, but I'm lazy and this seems like an easy solution.

If you do have to use a WinForms application the XtraGrid was very nice.

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/XtraGrid/

You can choose columns, apply filters, and group data all at runtime. Plus it's easy to save user settings.

 

[jodyjay]

stsuing,

I've actually downloaded an evaluation copy of the DevExpress WindowForms product (which includes the XtraGrid and XtraTreeList). I think that I could use these two together to get what I need.

Thanks for your suggestion.

-jodyjay