Alpha Five's best feature: Your feedback baked in

We consider one of our biggest strengths here at Alpha Software to be our active and involved customer base, or as we like to call them, Alphaholics. There's a couple of places you can find Alphaholics. The best place is our message board. If you're not signed up, we encourage you to check it out. It's a great place to find ideas and support while building your apps. You can also find them in our LinkedIn group.

Our Alphaholics work frequently with us by offering their suggestions and ideas that are designed to make Alpha Five the most productive development tool that it can be.

Most recently, we received a request from a very skilled and talented developer, Vaughn Seward, who runs a mid-sized development company in Canada. He has been shifting his development work from Visual Studio .NET to Alpha Five.

Vaughn's a great example of the customer base that I'm always raving about. He brought a problem to our attention, described it in detail, and then gave us some great feedback to let us know the outcome.

I'm going to let Vaughn tell you about his relationship with the Alpha Five team in his own words:

In building Alpha Five grids, we have frequently come across parent-child situations where a field value in the row on the parent grid is required to be available in the child grid. Such as, the filter in a drop-down on the child grid needs to be based on a field from the parent record, a field in the child record needs to be defaulted to a field value from the parent record, and a validation or hide/show decision needs to be based on a check-box from the parent record.

We have found that these and other cases can be handled in a number of different ways by including JavaScript in the child grid, or by creating and passing session variables. When a session variable is used, it has to somehow be created just prior to the calling of the child grid. Because of the timing between what happens on the server and what happens on the client side, it is not a simple matter to make this work.

I therefore recently created a small sample application and sent it to Alpha that showed one way we were currently solving the problem. I wasn't satisfied with our current approaches because they involved making unnecessary Ajax callbacks to set session variables, or subject to possible race conditions if a button was clicked to open a child component before the callback to set the session variable had completed.

The developers at Alpha looked at my test case and came up with an idea for a new feature that they could add to the Action Javascript Builder for the action which opens a child Component. Alpha's solution solved our problem perfectly (see video M41).

I was impressed with the way in which Alpha carefully listened to the problem we were trying to solve and came up with a solution that addressed our specific needs which should also be of widespread interest to all developers.

One of our developers just had the need to use the session-var-setting enhancement. After asking him if setting up session variables was any easier now, he replied: "Yes, I love it."

And there's more where that came from -- I receive emails like this on a daily basis. It means that our Alpha developers are constantly thinking about how we can improve. And as a co-chairman, what more can you ask for?

Thanks again to Vaughn for letting us share this!