Re: Mobile Device Application for inventory tracking

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2. Must be very fast, ie no clicking verification windows, tabbing to
the next field, but still have validation rules for the fields.

Well, you don't have a tab key on most devices :-) You are right to want to make life as easy as possible for the operator to enter data, but how exactly were you anticipating that to be done? Do you have a particular device in mind, eg with a keyboard?

3. Must have a database back-end. A master file must be loaded and
records processed from this master. As they are processed, they must be
deleted to assure no duplicate work is completed. Typically, there will
be upwards of 10,000 records at any given time, with an upper echelon
well into the 100,000s.

No offence, but loading that many records on a PDA is asking for trouble. It'll take some time to actually do it, it'll affect your apps performance, and it's not usually necessary. I wouldn't return a result set of 100,000 records to a PC, let alone a PDA.

PDAs are not like little laptops. So sometimes you need to be cleverer handling large amounts of data. You need to ask yourself if all that is really necessary - really truly necessary, rather than it just being the first thing you think of.

It seems to me that no-one in the world works fast enough to process even the 10,000 inventory items before the battery will go flat, let alone hundreds of thousands. So rather than removing things from the list, would it be better to add them to an initially empty list? Searching for duplicates will be much faster this way :-)

You may need some data on the device for validation, but in this type of application, I'm sceptical. I have had several people say things like "the operator needs to check that the bar code scanned corresponds to the item". Which sounds reasonable until you see people actually doing this stuff. Very often, the only identification between very similar products is the bar code on the bin they're in. Will your operators really be able to identify hundreds of thousands of items by eye? And supposing they do indentify a discrepancy, what's the procedure then? It's not like you can correct it on the PDA. The problem is in the main server database.

4. Must be able to integrate with Access. This could be discarded if an
additional application could be built that resides on a desktop, but
the scanner must be able to communicate with this application. That's
why Access seems to be the easy way out.

What are you anticipating will be easy with Access? You can write PC apps that can talk via ActiveSync, or you can do things with WiFi (web services, say). Syncing data is something that is not well thought out on PPCs, IMO.

On the topic of WiFi, you've picked an application were the devices will probably not be used as designed (ie turned on and off several times a day, and only used for short periods). Using them continuously will hit the batteries pretty hard, especially if you have a scanner attached, and super especially if you use WiFi. You need to think about specialist devices if you haven't already.

Again, how easy is it to develop PocketPC applications using .NET? I
have some C# experience, but can't remember if its an option or not.

Yes it is, if you have the Pro version or better of VS. It's a different mindset writing PDA apps though.


Cheers,
Jim Cooper

__________________________________________

Jim Cooper    jcooper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tabdee Ltd    http://www.tabdee.ltd.uk

TurboSync - Connecting Delphi to your Palm
__________________________________________
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