42windmills Application Designer

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Features 42windmills applications Business process automation The platform of 42windmills includes a workflow module that you can use to automate your business processes based on the rules, logic and actions that you design. Conceptually, you can think of 42windmills workflow as an application or service that runs in the background, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, constantly evaluating your application data and the multiple business rules in your deployment. When the workflow service encounters a trigger event, it fires the appropriate business rules to run the workflow actions. Typical business rule actions include sending an e-mail message, creating a task, and updating a data field on a record. Multi-Currency Management If your business includes users throughout the world 42windmills supports multiple currencies in a single database so that all your users use a single application deployment. By using Multi-Currency Management your users will be able to manage and edit unlimited currencies and related exchange rates, define default currency for the application, maintain currency in record level and field level, automatically update Exchange Rate values, change currency for a record while automatically exchanging all the currency symbols and currency information accordingly. Robust security model The apps of 42windmills use a role-based security model to provide you with incredible detailed and flexible security configuration options. You can structure the system so that users can access and edit only the information they need for their jobs. The security model uses two main concepts, Role-based and object-based security, and the Organizational structure. 42windmills uses security roles and role-based security as its core security management techniques: •Security role: describes a set of access levels and privileges for each of the entities; •Role-based security: all users must have one or more security role assigned to them. In addition to security roles, 42windmills uses an organization’s structure as a key concept in its security model. 42windmills uses the following definitions to describe an organization’s structure: •Organization: the Company that owns the deployment. The organization is the top level of the application business management hierarchy. You can also refer to the organization as the root business unit; •Business Unit: A logical grouping of your business operations. Each business unit can act as a parent for one or more child business units; •User: Someone who typically works for the organization and has access to the application. Each user belongs to one (and only one) business unit, and each user is assigned one or more security roles. Powerful grids The Grids in the application are very flexible and user configurable. Sorting and grouping on all columns is supported.   E-Mail Templates As their name implies, with e-mail templates you can create preformatted e-mail messages that you can reference in several areas throughout your application. You can insert data fields into e-mail templates that your application will dynamically populate on usage. For each e-mail template that you create, you must specify the single entity (such as account or contact) to which the template applies. You can also reference e-mail templates in 42windmills workflow to accomplish many types of business process automation techniques. Data Management Very rarely does a company deploy an app without any existing customer data. Consequently, there’s always a data import process to go along with each app deployment. With your source data files (csv format) ready, next you need to create a data map to correlate the data you’re importing to the correct application data fields. With your source data file and data map complete, you’re ready to import the data into your application. To view the progress of a data import you can view a list of imported processes. For every import process you can see details about the data map used the number of successful imports, number of failures and so on. With one simple click you can delete the records for one particular import process. Export All grids (default and user defined) can be exported to PDF, MS Excel, MS Word. This is commonly used for operational work reports. The output will be formatted based on your views and filters. File Upload Using File Upload, you can upload multiple files at the same time. You can define the entity to upload the files and create your own file pattern to separate the files into the right records. For example, uploading multiple product factsheets based on the product number pattern. Web services Web services is a XML based technology developed by W3C for communication between systems on the internet. With these web services you can call a function of another system for a specific calculation (like exchange rates) or retrieving data (like postal codes). All your entities are available for the web services. Of course, you can also make use of web services to connect different 42windmills applications. Besides the advantage of data shopping between the applications, it’s also possible to create a distributed mechanism to manage information in different systems, without introducing redundancy. Auto-numbering Auto numbering is a handy little feature that will search out the next consecutive or random number for you, and as the name suggests, it does it automatically. It then adds that number into the field where the data type is set to 'AutoNumber'. You can define a prefix and start number for every entity in your model. However, this is optional. By default the auto number will contain the year, current month and number (e.g. 201105-00250).   Calculations What if you could define a field that looked at information that was already entered into the system and told you something new about it? Calculations give you the ability to do just that. Just as you can use a spreadsheet program like MS Excel to define calculations and metrics specific to your business, you can use custom formula fields to define calculations and metrics that are specific to your application. Form Assistant The Form Assistant is ubiquitous throughout the application and can always be found on the right side of any form you’re working with. The Form Assistant has the capability to select an entry for virtually every field on the page that has a lookup field associated with it, without having to open the lookup pop-up window. Lookups The lookups are designed to find matching data in one list and load into another entity (e.g. a country lookup list). Lookups are a new way of helping the user to select values of a pre-defined list. Using web techniques like ‘type-ahead’ improve the user experience. Queries Have you ever wanted to combine information from multiple tables in your application in an efficient manner? 42windmills offers a powerful query function with an easy-to-learn interface that makes it a snap to extract exactly the information you need from your database. Reports Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services accelerates report creation, facilitates sharing and collaboration, and provides a complete platform to enable organizations to deliver relevant information across the entire enterprise. The Microsoft Report Viewer control embeds reports directly into your business application. Easy navigation The ribbon is formed as a panel that houses the command buttons and icons, organizes commands as a set of tabs, each grouping relevant commands. Each application has a different set of tabs which expose the functionality that application offers. Advanced Find A powerful utility for mining and retrieving data. The Advanced Find feature lets users create their own queries and then save those queries for later re-use. Related Information Related information can always be found on the left side of any form you’re working with. It defines how entities interact with each other. Flexible GUI Every form has groups with (required/recommended/no constraint) fields in it. The groups can be collapsed or expanded. Tabbing sequences are always automatically in sync with the expanded groups.