Developing Sales Force Applications Using Resco MobileApp Studio

Are you a .NET developer of mobile applications?

Imagine that you have to create a sales force or field service application for mobile device. Such applications often require plenty of screens so that the end-user can view and modify all sorts of business data. For each screen you will probably need specific control for presenting data such as ListView or control for modifying the data such as DetailView. Moreover, the business people are usually demanding. The application will be used by all sorts of stakeholders such as employees, customers, external organizations, suppliers etc. The problem is that these people have different mobile devices and the developer thus needs to create a different application with same functionality for different platforms. You can already imagine how much hassle that developer will have. In this article we will present our latest sample project for Resco MobileApp Studio which can help to overcome a lot of problems if you need to deal with mobile business applications.

Sample Application

MobileApp Studio now comes with the sample sales force or field service application. You can download the trial version here and try it on your own.

The main screen is a menu created by the MobileAppList. The enduser can navigate throughout this screen to access business data about his customers, products or orders. The first screen is linked with following screens. These were created using MobileAppList and MobileAppDetail controls. As you can see this is the very simple application. So where is the magic? You can very easily change the look of the application by changing styles and layout of these screens. Moreover, with Resco MobileApp Studio you will also get the MobileForms Toolkit controls, components and libraries which you can use to further boost the user interface of this application.

Modifying the look of your Sales Force Mobile App

You will often need to change the look of your mobile application so that it will match the customer’s website, logo or something. Without MobileApp Studio you will be forced to open and modify each control and each form in your application to make changes that will fully satisfy your customer. If you have installed MobileApp Studio on your computer, you will be able to make these changes very easily. You can open the style editor to create a new style or modify the existing one. There are plenty of properties of these styles. No coding is needed. All you need is your mouse!

As soon as you change the style that was already used in your mobile controls, the changes will immediately reflect in your application without the need to edit each control separately.

You can also determine and set which data can the end-user see and modify on his mobile screen. This is all done using WYSIWYG editor. You can preview all the changes that you make in real time on MobileApp Studio designers.

Adding Further Functionality to your App

Suppose you want to add more functionality to your controls. Can you do all the stuff you did with controls in MobileForms Toolkit? The answer is: yes, you can! Controls created in MobileAppStudio like MobileAppList or MobileAppDetail are inherited from controls from MobileForms Toolkit (AdvancedList, DetailView). That means you can work with those controls as you were used to work with them using our toolkits.

public partial class OrderDetails : Resco.Controls.DetailView.DetailView

In the sample application, you can modify an order by selecting the customer from the list of customers. In the OrderDetails control, that is a MobileAppDetail, there is a Customer field of type LinkItem. When you click on that specific item, the new screen opens and the end-user is presented with a list of customers, from which he can pick one, that will be assigned to the specific order. To do this, you will have to create an event handler that will react on the action, triggered by user clicking on the ‘Choose customer’ item.

public OrderDetails()
{
	InitializeComponent();
	((ItemLink)this.Items["PickCustomer"]).Clicked += PickCustomer_Clicked;
}

In the event handler, we open the Form that contains the same MobileApp control as is being used in Customers.cs form. This list control has three RowTemplates. First one is used on an unselected row of data in the lsit. Second one is for selected row, it contains more information about customer and end-user can click on the ‘More Info…’ button to change the customer data. The third RowTemplate is set as SelectedRowTempalte in the new Form, we use to select a customer.

When user selects the specific customer by clicking on the select button, the form closes and we change the ‘Customer’ property of an ‘Order’ object.

void PickCustomer_Clicked(object sender, ItemEventArgs e)
{
	var frm = CommonForms.FormPickCustomer as FormPickCustomer;
	var order = (Order)this.DataSource;
	
	frm.SelectedCustomer = order.Customer;
	if (frm.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
	{
		order.Customer = frm.SelectedCustomer;
		((ItemLink)this.Items["PickCustomer"]).Text = frm.SelectedCustomer.Name;
		this.UpdateControl();
	}
}

You can also check out how you can create and modify your mobile sales force application using Resco MobileApp Studio here: