Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Is there a way to calculate running total in WorkXpress?

There are some key features in any service the help in driving success. To my opinion Running total really add to this. This is the reason I pay attention to how it works in any web based system.

To calculate running total in WorkXpress let’s get back to our standard example with Date and Amount:


At first I tried to calculate running total myself. But after few steps were taken I reached a deadlock, so had to ask Workxpress guys to help me out. Treff LaPlante (WorkXpress President & CEO) was there to assist me and answered my question:
"…running totals is a feature that we’ve supported in WorkXpress in previous generations of the platform; however, we’ve just released the support for this current generation of the platform."

This is how it is tuned. I’ve added the second field Amount on the list through Reuse tab on the Block Creator:


It allows you while editing this field to set up an alternative name using "Use Local Field Label" property:



To calculate running total on "Currency and Number Settings" tab set up "Alternative value to show" property into "Running Total".


After saving the data we’ve got needed result:


In case you need more detailed instructions you may check out the info here.

Conclusions:

Actually, I think the user won’t have any problem configuring how to calculate Running Total in WorkXpress. If talk about systems I’ve tested the implementation of this function in WorkXpress is one of the easiest regarding set up from business user standpoint.

There is one more interesting thing to learn from this case, the same situation happened while trying to find out how to import data into Zoho Creator. This can be a moot point, but as the matter of fact it shows the system immaturity. Some developers rush to add features to the product in case of missing functionality. On the other hand this can be considered as the "Reality Check" of the product.

1 comment:

  1. It is possible, but about as clear as mud. It takes an expert, like yourself, do defunk the funkiness of these PAAS solutions. Comparing this to a good general purpose database shows how poorly some of these web solutions come off. Take Filemaker for instance - running totals are trivial.

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