Hi all,

At the moment I'm trying to use custom views to win over some of our staff who are wary of RE due to the complexity of the constituent edit mode.

I'm really frustrated by the simplicity of the view editor built into RE, so I've been pulling the generated XML out of the database and editing it by hand. This works for things like making styles and positioning consistent, but so far I'm struggling to make headway into some of the more advanced things I'd like to try.

For instance, it should be possible to turn web addresses (e.g. LinkedIn profiles) into hyperlinks. Similarly, I should be able to use a constituent attribute to pull an ID, then use a web service to retrieve a profile picture.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so if anyone knows of anywhere that I could find some pointers I'd be really grateful.

Cheers,
Tom

Omatic's new product AppOmatic has a view builder in it that has a lot of options. You might want to check it out. I personally have not used it but I saw a demo and it seemed impressive.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the responses. Oddly enough, I have been playing around with AOM for other reasons. Just hadn't realised it could do constituent views too.

I'll have a play around and let you know how I get on.

Tom

OK, my initial impression is that it's far from obvious that I need "Stock Views" as well as the "View Manager".

After that hurdle, the new panels look great. I love the way they look.

Few questions spring to mind:

1) Is there a way to lock the way the panels are arranged within a view? I.e. Can I "set and forget"? I can imagine some less-savvy users raising support issues after "breaking" their views.

2) Can I filter the contents of a panel? For instance, I may want to only have notes of type "major donor" on a major donor view.

3) Is there a guide anywhere for this aspect of AOM? In particular, I'd really like to know how to author panels myself. They look like they use WPF, which ought not to be problem for me as I have access to Visual Studio.

All in all this looks much better than the vanilla RE offering and I'd love to know how to make the most of it.

Thanks Amanda

I've added a couple of uservoice suggestions:

* Once docked, allow custom view panels to be locked in place

* Allow the contents of custom view panels to be filtered

Also, found an answer to my third question. There's an introductory video (after the parts on apps and widgets) and sample code. Going to get stuck in :)