Hi all,
I want to outline a couple of challenges I have with project design and I would love to find out if others have similar struggles and how you approach the design. Here are two scenarios:
I have several applications for a company - like HR Portal, Staff Portal, Supervisor Portal, Sales Data, etc. Each one is a distinct project/application with unique URLs, menus, securities, and data connections (but many of these are the same and could be shared between apps). On the Staff Portal application I have a "Links" page, which is a database table that stores links to all the other apps. This works ok, but it lacks a cohesive feel. Each app is really independent (though I do try and make them look similar, and have a "home" link back to the staff portal). It would be great if all applications could share a menu - or maybe a "top level" menu, which would allow you to navigate to the other applications, and then get the sub-menu associated with that app. I know there is a robust menu editor in ASPR with the ability to do sub-menus, but I have never really figured out how that works. And in this case, the sub-menus are actually another application, so not easy access to their page links in ASPR - they would all be "external".
The second scenario is kind of the other way around: I have one application that is huge with many sub functions (job/process functions, not software functions) within it. Building this all in one project is good because all sub functions share a menu and it's easy for the user to navigate around. But from a development standpoint it's a bit unruly. Inevitably I am doing some work in one section, and then need to quickly fix something in another section and publish, which publishes my half finished work from the first section. In 10.3, the new "draft" mode for pages helps quite a bit, but isn't perfect (especially with projects that I upgraded from previous versions, seemingly). And these large projects just don't perform as well in the ASPR development app - the app seems more clunky and can take a very long time to build.
What would be great is if there was some kind of "master" project that managed data connections, menus, securities, shared code/functions,URLs, headers, styles, etc. - and you could associate "child" projects, and in the child projects you could just focus on a smaller group of tables/views, pages, and events. I haven't fully thought this through, but the concept seems like what I'm after.
So am I missing something in my approach? Does anyone else struggle with this, or have a good solution? Would project templates be a way to achieve this concept of smaller projects pulled together into one larger, cohesive application?
Thanks for reading.
Tim
I want to outline a couple of challenges I have with project design and I would love to find out if others have similar struggles and how you approach the design. Here are two scenarios:
I have several applications for a company - like HR Portal, Staff Portal, Supervisor Portal, Sales Data, etc. Each one is a distinct project/application with unique URLs, menus, securities, and data connections (but many of these are the same and could be shared between apps). On the Staff Portal application I have a "Links" page, which is a database table that stores links to all the other apps. This works ok, but it lacks a cohesive feel. Each app is really independent (though I do try and make them look similar, and have a "home" link back to the staff portal). It would be great if all applications could share a menu - or maybe a "top level" menu, which would allow you to navigate to the other applications, and then get the sub-menu associated with that app. I know there is a robust menu editor in ASPR with the ability to do sub-menus, but I have never really figured out how that works. And in this case, the sub-menus are actually another application, so not easy access to their page links in ASPR - they would all be "external".
The second scenario is kind of the other way around: I have one application that is huge with many sub functions (job/process functions, not software functions) within it. Building this all in one project is good because all sub functions share a menu and it's easy for the user to navigate around. But from a development standpoint it's a bit unruly. Inevitably I am doing some work in one section, and then need to quickly fix something in another section and publish, which publishes my half finished work from the first section. In 10.3, the new "draft" mode for pages helps quite a bit, but isn't perfect (especially with projects that I upgraded from previous versions, seemingly). And these large projects just don't perform as well in the ASPR development app - the app seems more clunky and can take a very long time to build.
What would be great is if there was some kind of "master" project that managed data connections, menus, securities, shared code/functions,URLs, headers, styles, etc. - and you could associate "child" projects, and in the child projects you could just focus on a smaller group of tables/views, pages, and events. I haven't fully thought this through, but the concept seems like what I'm after.
So am I missing something in my approach? Does anyone else struggle with this, or have a good solution? Would project templates be a way to achieve this concept of smaller projects pulled together into one larger, cohesive application?
Thanks for reading.
Tim