If you manage to tune master-detail of TrackVia let me know!

Dealing with web-based systems I keep on looking for a so-called "holy grail" of SaaS solutions. Ok, not a holy grail, but at least that one, which would correspond to at least 40% of "we are the best out there" crap. Hopefully, I will manage to do that before the World Ocean dries out.

So, let’s get down to business and check the organization of master-detail relation of TrackVia. I won’t deviate from previous algorithm of testing, as I did it with invoices and items of Dabble DB, Coghead and Quickbase. This is how the invoice looks like:


And here you can check the creation of Invoice Item:


I couldn’t find an option to display my invoice with items on one and the same screen and to calculate Grand Total of all invoice items and reflect this sum in the invoice.

So I decided to ask TrackVia support to give me a hand at this and this is what Ed Dunigan offered:

"With TrackVia, you can edit parent and child records at the same time through a custom view. You would create a view and denote the fields you want included in the view. You would then select to display the view in Edit All where you can then edit all fields desired."

I took Ed’s advice and built this custom view, this is how it looks like in Edit All mode:


Summing up:

What can I say … This option is definitely not enough for master detail support: the user doesn’t edit items of all invoices simultaneously and the very point of master detail is in displaying the data as the comprehensive whole, I mean users want to display invoice with items, not separate titles and positions.

It seems to me that currently TrackVia program is developed for single table/database applications, let alone the possibility to create relation between tables and any calculation of this relation is very limited.