Better Attachments With Strata

Attachments are one of those Granite features that people seem to use a lot, or hardly at all. At Cane, we have a customer that uses them a lot. Seriously a lot. They currently have over 50,000 attachments stored in Granite. Which is great!

But they had a problem. If you recall, when you open the Manage Attachments window, the first thing you?re presented with is a list of all the attachments in the system. If you don't have that many, it's not really an issue. Maybe you wait a few seconds for the list to load. But if you have a lot, you can be waiting quite a while. Minutes even. Worse yet, if your Weblogic configuration isn't correct, you can end up waiting a few minutes and get nothing but an error message for your trouble. Not so great!

At our customer's request, we set out to enhance the attachments functionality making it more streamlined, performant and consistent with the rest of Granite's user interface.

First, we wanted to make the user experience familiar. In Granite, this means first having a blank object screen in which some fields are set to perform a query-by-example search.

This works just as you would expect. Based on the values you supply, we query the database and bring back the list of matching Attachment records. We even honor the maximum result size set in User Preferences.

From here you can open the Attachment record by double-clicking or the Open button. You can also view the Attachment's file from here.

Once open, click Edit to modify the Attachment, or Delete to delete it.

Creating new Attachments is just as simple. Just click the New button as you would when creating any other object in Granite. This functionality is available for all Granite objects in their respective Attachments sub-panel.

Easy, quick and familiar! And it's available now as a component of Strata. Which you should be using. Really. It's very nice.