Attribute Suggestion

JWS

I'm evaluating your software right now, and I will say I'm pretty impressed. It does things in a really cool way that really doesn't need much tweaking for the user interface. That said, I am working on a "Public" database that mainly collects information from it's users. An important part of that information is "contact" data.

It would be very nice if, when I query the database for a particular group of users, that their information such as email address, or home page url be shown as a hyperlink on the results page, where I can click to send an email, or bring up their url in a new page.

I think that attributes should have a selection for "email" or "url" where it would take the text input such as email@somehost.com, or www.mypage.com, and and add the appropriate "mailto:" or "http://" to the text that was added by the user.

I think I understand the capabilities of the mail and hyperlink functions in the software as they exist today, but I think what I'm referring to would enhance the overall capability of the software.

If there is a way to do this in the current version, I haven't found it. Thanks for listening. Your support has been excellent.

aware_support

At the moment Aware IM does not support this. We are getting quite a number of requests from people to include this functionality and we will do this in the next version.

aware_support2

Actually, hyperlinks for attributes containing a URL are supported in an Aware IM feature known as presentation. Basically, a presentation is a powerful read-only alternative to an object form that can be used to display results of a query or details of an object. In addition, presentations may have operations displayed as hyperlinks, for example, to send an email, or to switch to an edit form, etc.

Presentations give you much more freedom in terms of visual design. They can also contain sub-presentations, making it possible to display related objects on the same page. For example, a presentation can show a list of customers with a list of accounts for each customer.

Presentations may be especially useful for public access as an alternative to view-only forms. Please check out Aware IM User Guide for more details on presentations and the Photo Album sample application for examples of presentations.

JWS

Thanks for the reply. I'd really like to see that capability in a future version.

I did get that functionality using "presentations" as you mentioned. It does add extra steps though as you must basically get your search down to the subject you want to email and use an extra link to bring up the presentation, then select the resulting hyperlink to send an email, or visit a webpage. It works, but is not the optimal solution. I'd love to see "inline" links. Thanks again.

aware_support

If you use presentations to display results of a query then there are no extra steps involved (note that a presentation can show not only a single instance of an object but multiple instances as well).

But anyway we agree that the functionality to have hyperlinks on forms would be very useful too.