New Introduction to OpenInsight Training Course Format

With an increased and growing interest in OpenInsight application development, I am pleased to announce that RevSoft UK are now in a position to offer the Introduction to OpenInsight training course at a budget price.  This will provide anyone new to OpenInsight with an opportunity to gain some valuable product and application development knowledge usually within the tight training budgets that that many people are having to maintain at the moment.

Unlike our premium offering which is presented by a highly experienced OpenInsight application developer who can go off topic and get application specific, this budget level training course will closely following the published Introduction to OpenInsight course agenda in a classroom style setting.  Of course, our usual premium level training workshops are still available for those of you with specific requirements and who wish to undertake training within the context of your specific application or proposed project.

Please drop me a line if you are interested in registering your interest for the next Introduction to OpenInsight training course to be held in Ealing, London in a few weeks’ time.

Thanks,
Martyn.

A date for your diary!!

Mark your calendars! The next Revelation Software Users’ Conference will be held at the Sheraton Music City Hotel, Nashville, Tennessee, USA on April 16-19, 2013. This is your chance to connect with the heart of downtown Nashville at the Country Music Hall of Fame or experience the awe of The Grande Ole Opry. Spend a relaxing day at one of Nashville’s beautiful state parks, the Adventure Science Center, or the home of President Andrew Jackson – The Hermitage. The Nashville International Airport is also just minutes away.

As well as the wonderful sight seeing, this event will also give you a great opportunity to network with some of the leading OpenInsight developers from around the world and to get yourself on their radars.  Along with these invaluable networking opportunities, you will also hear from some of these leading lights during the highly informative and educational technical talks.  With the emphasis on education, this is one trip that you can’t afford to miss and one that you can (hopefully) put down against your 2013 training budget.

I look forward to seeing you in Nashville on the 16^th April 2013.  It will be interesting to see how the Revelation team will top the ‘amazing’ 2011 conference .

Running O4W offline.

I got caught out the other day whilst running through my O4W presentation for a client. The PowerPoint side of things was fine, but I got caught out when trying to run the O4W demo for real without an internet connection.

Running O4W offline seems a strange thing to want to do.  After all, it’s a web based solution and therefore it should be hooked up to the internet – Right??

Well not always.

Everything had been running fine and I’d really been cracking on with the O4W proof of concept application.  It was now less than 12 hours before I’d be heading off to Ireland and time for one last run through the demo.  However, being a Thursday night it was archery day and, with a competition looming and new arrows to content with, Lauren was anxious to go practice.  So I found myself on the archery field, laptop in hand and no internet connection.

The PowerPoint side of things was naturally a breeze.  The animations needed a little fine tuning, but otherwise all was good.  However, when I came to run the O4W demo for real things took a downwards turn.

In short, O4W out of the box requires access to the internet for the jQuery libraries.  No internet connection = no access to those libraries and (in my case) = no menu to run the application.  Caught, hook line and sinker.

As usual though, the guys at Revelation have thought about this and it is easy to reconfigure O4W to run offline.  You just need to know where and how.  Herein, follows the where and how.

Firstly, you’ll need to make sure that you do this ‘with’ an internet connection.  Without one and things get a little difficult.  Once on the web, run up O4W in developer mode and navigate to the ‘Scripts’ tab on the O4W Configuration page.  This is the page where your templates and scripts are defined.  We are interested in setting the following prompts on this tab:

1. Source for jQuery needs to be changed to ‘Provided O4W Files (without Internet connection)
2. The URL for jQuery from O4W prompt should be changed to ‘../jquery/’.  This might be slightly different depending on your virtual drive, etc.
3. If, like me, you have used one of the various themes available online (I was using Sunny), you’ll need to select one of the themes that ships with O4W.  I would suggest Smoothness as a good starting point as it’s clean, fresh and it looks nice.

Once the above changes have been made, save the form, close the browser and restart your engine server.  Depending on your browser settings you might also need to clear out your cache to avoid any problems.  I use Firefox without saving the history, so I’m pretty much good to go.

This time, if you switch off your internet connection and run up O4W (or your application) you should get the new theme, but running offline.

So what about your nice fancy theme?

Getting your preferred theme is almost as easy, but it needs a couple more steps.  Firstly you’ll need to download your jQuery theme (or acquire your own css theme) and save the files into the appropriate CSS folder.  Choose the one that matches the version that you are using.  In my current version of O4W I chose the 1.4.4 folder, making my path C:\\MyOIDirectory\O4W\jquery\1.4.4\css\sunny.  In that folder, I placed the downloaded theme’s images folder and the jquery-ui-1.8.14.custom file.  The number did not correspond to the jQuery version defined in O4W, so I changed that filename to be jquery-ui-1.8.6.custom.

Now that we have our theme in place we can launch O4W in design mode and navigate back to the Scripts tab.  This time, change the jQuery Theme to ‘Other (Custom)’ and type ‘sunny’ in to the ‘or Other Theme’ prompt.  (I should mention that you should not include the quotes marks (‘ ’) when making these changes in the O4W form.

Finally, check the details in the form, save it and close the browser, clear the cache, restart the engine server and rerun the application in offline
mode.

If you are running this in Firefox, then all should be well.  However, at the time of writing IE is not picking up the theme properly and you’ll have to stick with one of the O4W supplied themes.  This has been reported, so watch for a fix in a future release of O4W (OI 9.3 or later).

If this blog posting sounds a little long and confusing, don’t worry.  Watch my YouTube Channel and, with any luck, I’ll have a video walking you through this over the next couple of days.

O4W Quick Start Guide Video Series

Well the midnight oil has been well and truly burning in my office these last few days, but finally the O4W Quick Start Series of videos are now complete and published to the web. You can gain access to the series from the new O4W Quick Start Guide page on our website.

The video series works through extending the Clinic application that we built in the desktop tutorial series and it provides us with a great example if extending a small ‘existing’ OI application. When I began the desktop series, I had only planned on web enabling one form as an example. However, when I saw what we achievable (at my level) with O4W I went quite a fair bit further.

I hope that you find the series of videos useful and I’ll welcome your feedback as always. I should also say a special thank you to Bryan at RevUS for his patience in answering some silly questions at times and helping over a couple of small hurdles.

OI QSG – The Grande Finale

OK – So I was not done with the OpenInsight Quick Start Guide Video Series. As a few of you have rightly pointed out, I hadn’t done anything with the table on the Consultations tab on the Patient Entry window. Well, that just happened to leave a nice topic for a finale, encore, or whatever.

The 24th lesson (could this now be ‘learn OpenInsight in 24 hours’) is a feature length lesson in which we look at creating the facility to capture consultations (appointments), hook them up to the Patient window and we create a report for our hypothetical receptionists and doctors to see appointments for any given day.

In this final video (before I look at O4W), the lesson will pretty much summarise the whole series by working with the Table Builder, Forms Designer, Indexes, User Interface Workspace, Scripts and the Report Builder.

I hope that you find the series useful and that this last lesson puts the cherry on the cake.

The final page of the final chapter is complete and the book is now closed.

For those of you that have been following my OpenInsight Quick Start Guide series of videos, the last few videos have just been completed and they are either now uploading to my YouTube Channel or rendering for then uploading. Once uploaded, I will add them to the main OI QSG playlist and also link to them from our web site.

The last few videos look at using Query By Form (QBF) within our Patient Entry window, creating reports and making them available to our users, making use of Index Lookups in OpenInsight and finally we wrap up the application. I’ve not covered wrapping up with the RDK as that is a big subject in its own right and people often choose different deployment methods to meet their own needs. I’ll therefore leave that for the official training.

I hope that you find the series useful and I will be beginning work on the O4W QSG series very, very soon.

New OpenInsight 9.0 Example Application

Well, I have finally bitten the bullet and version 1.0.1 of my PSS Media Library OpenInsight version 9 examples application is now ready for anyone who wants the initial copy.

As many of you will know, my technical ability is limited at best, but OpenInsight 9.0 has enabled me to take this fact finding project right through to deployment stage – something I really did not think would be possible for someone with my skills. It just goes to show how far OpenInsight has come in recent years.

The application is designed to enable users to manage a photograph collection by defining disks records, image records and then assigning those images to one or more disks. The application has a relatively consistent look, but it mixes ideas including basic windows, tab controls, hierarchical list boxes, MDI and various styles of OIPI reports, amongst other things.

The no-code NSIS installation routine (from Nullsoft) includes all of the source code so OpenInsight developers can easily drop in their 9.0 development license file and dive into the reports, windows, event handlers and stored procedures. The installation also includes a full developer’s briefing detailing the various features and also a user guide for anyone wanting to use the application more seriously.

Please simply drop me an email should wish to receive a copy of the application.

Click here for a youtube video presentation of the application.