E. Generating forms

Windows forms are the main GUI elements in our MIS applications, so our generator tool allows power users to (if they wish) automatically generate these forms and save them in a selected destination folder. The generated forms can be reused in various end user application modules. Currently we support generating Windows forms for .NET versions 1.0 to 3.5, using Microsoft’s CodeDom library. We recently made progress on automatic generation of Web and XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) forms, which will be used in our forthcoming software.

Different forms can be generated based on the data stored in database tables, data object model related classes, as well as multi-language translation resources. However, all generated forms use the same conventions allowing to create and update underlying data objects (which are managed within the central application component). For example, each element from a medical record item object (and, thus, each field from the corresponding database table) is represented with a label and an appropriate field allowing editing. Different data types correspond to different visual components: shorttext is represented with a regular textbox, description with a multiline textbox, numeric value with a light orange background, image with an image boxe, Boolean value with a checkbox, while collections of ENUM range objects with combo boxes (allowing an end user to choose from a list of offered values). Measurement unit is represented as a label on the right of the editing component, while all ranges are combined in a label placed right of the measurement unit. Figure 6 shows a Windows form generated for the temperature_list entity that represents a set of values from the basic medical examination of a patient: body temperature (label “temperatura”), systolic and diastolic blood pressure (“sistolni pritisak” and “dijastolni pritisak”), and heart beats per minute (“puls”) along with general remarks (“napomene”).

Figure 11 Form for entering and editing values on the temperature_list record