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Intranet application Product Type Catalog

screenshot of application Product Catalog

It is advantage to have database of product types when building intranet for production company. A lot of applications make use data from this database. They are Production Plan, Production and Quality Reports, Material Consumtion and Down Time to name some applications. To use the list of product types makes live easier for both user and programmer.

Product Type Catalog database contains names of products, dimmensions and weight data, packing data and some productivity and process data like plan of good pieces, machine cycles. This makes possible to calculate plan fulfilment, predict material consumption etc.

In the left part of screenshot there is list of some product types. Only basic data of products are displayed on application home page. Complete product type data and description is possible to find in catalog page. Example of catalog page you can see in the right part of picture.

In the middle part of screenshots there is package list edit form. Dimmensions, number of pieces in box, brutto and netto weight, number of boxes in standard truck, in wagoon and in container you can find here.

Other pages like on line inventory (actual number of products in warehouse according to types), standards of machine cycles according to types, general edit form, productivity data edit form and some other pages are not shown in screenshot.

When new product type is established by customer service department, email is sent to people that are responsible for completion the record by subsequent data. So master of packing have to add packing data (form in the picture), master of production have to add machine cycles, weight etc.

Please note the form in the package list table. You can see complete table of all package types and one record which is open for editing (yellow line). This is standard HTML form. If you have permitions for editing of this form, you are able to edit package records just from this table. Advantage of this method is that you see all records, so you can compare actual input data with data from other records. Then we do not need separate form page and this editing style mimic spreadsheet style.

I would like to describe this way of editing records some time later. Here just a few problems which need to be solved. For longer tables we have to retain vertical scrollbar position in order to restore page position after saving data and page reload. The width of input cells and text align has some issues too. Later on you will find description of these problems in section articles.

updated 09.06.2006