Oracle Forms Modernisation Case Study ILIAS Solutions

Transcription

1 Oracle Forms Modernisation Case Study ILIAS Solutions Business Context ILIAS Solutions is a technology company that provides a COTS Defense Logistics Information System (DLIS) based on Oracle technology. Development started in 1994 with Oracle Forms version 2.3 and Oracle Database version 6.0. The company went through almost all upgrades and today release 20 uses Oracle 11g release 2 for both Forms and Database. The ILIAS Enterprise Solution (ES) has about 700 forms and an install base of several thousands of users in different national and international defense organizations, including parts of NATO. When demonstrating the ILIAS ES to prospective customers, all of them were impressed by the capabilities of the system, but many were turned off by the old-fashioned look and feel of the Oracle Forms user interface. The user experience could not live up to the expectations of the modern day computer user. Time had come to change. This looks like pretty old technology With 20 years of know-how built in to the system, a software development team of Oracle Forms experts, and a user community of several thousands of users, a switch to a different technology would cause a significant amount of change. Change with which military organizations don t deal well. Apart from that, Oracle Forms still beats many other technologies in terms of speed of development. All things considered and being the Oracle Forms experts we are, we decided to see how far we could push this Forms thing to make it look good. The results are satisfied customers and more enthusiastic prospects. This document provides an overview of the changes we have made.

2 Before & After Before we dive into the details, let s have a look at what a typical form looked like before and after the facelift After Before The following sections provide a more detailed description on the components we used and adjusted to improve the user interface and user experience.

3 The Portal Top Banner The top banner is a component written in HTML; everything below is Oracle Forms. You could say this became our alternative to the Oracle Forms Menu. We will not elaborate further on this top banner. The only thing we can mention is that it communicates with Oracle Forms and vice-versa using JavaScript. The Forms Layout Forms Toolbar Just below the Top Banner, you see the Oracle Forms Toolbar. We use buttons without bevel loading gif images at runtime. Nothing special so far.

4 Content Canvas The main area is filled with a content canvas that has a tab page canvas on top of it. As you can see we styled the tab pages to have a flat look as well. The boxes inside are frames containing text items. Message Bar At the bottom of the page we restyled the Oracle Forms status bar. We kept the record item and hint text area. At the right side we added our magnifier. The magnifier allows minifying and magnifying an Oracle Forms screen. This option is transparent for the developer. On the internet we found poor alternatives; either the solutions could not minify properly or they had a severe impact towards development (post generation etc.). Today we are able to scale the screen taking into account the resolution of the client computer.

5 The Applet We ve extended the applet code to change the default behaviour of a number of Oracle Forms features. Notifications We extended the applet code to raise the notifications at the bottom right side of the screen, similar to Microsoft Outlook. We don t use the message bar or forms alert. Notifications are stacked and fade away after 10 seconds.

6 Current field indication The current field is marked with a blue border. List of Values Lists of values are indicates with a tiny symbol inside the field, which only appears when the item can be changed.

7 Bottom toolbar Our lists of values are implemented as Oracle Forms screens. They have bottom toolbars. Natively Oracle Forms does not support bottom or right hand side toolbars. Hide window bar in maximized mode In the example above you notice that form 1 has no window bar while form 2 does have one. This fits the look and feel better.

8 Checkboxes, Radio Buttons and Action Buttons We ve redrawn the checkboxes, radio buttons and action button elements to have a flat look. Colors We ve adjusted the color pallet (standard feature of Oracle Forms) and we ve adjusted the frame component so that it s background and border color can be changed at runtime (not a standard feature).

9 More Screens We ve included a web browser PJC that (in this example) displays a HighChart 1 component. 1

10 About ILIAS Solutions ILIAS Solutions specialises in defence logistics information management solutions (DLIS) with a twist. Our software platform focuses on the management of operational capabilities and the optimisation of operational readiness of the resources (materiel, people and budget) required for those operations. ILIAS Solutions, an Oracle Gold Partner for many years. For more information, please visit