We could nudge items when customizing forms with the cursor arrow keys?
Zoom in (Ctrl+mouse scroll) so we can see a pixel much easier if we use the mouse to align.
Add align - distribute tools to the format menu when you have a box highlighted (in addition to Top and Left)? This would spread all the text boxes equally between the top and bottom box.
Copy (or Cut) and Paste items you have selected (single or multiple), so you can move them around between groups or even tabs. Paste it in with an (2) or _2 suffix, and then you have something mostly configured, vs the tedious work around of going into the XML, manually scrolling (since no search) to find the items, changing the parent GUIDs… Or add a search box so you can filter to one item and fix it quickly.
Every time I need to add a field or re-arrange something, I move the “boxes” around manually, then I need to go into properties and change the Location and Size by typing in the correct (aligned) values. It’s super tedious, and even the most basic visual editing tools let you use cursor arrows to move things, or align multiple items. (Edit - I usually crank down the grid settings to 4,4, and turn on snap to grid, but on cluttered screens where items aren’t aligned to the grid to start with, it’s more challenging)
Or hope when you created something that the person requesting it doesn’t want your dozen things it in a different group on the page.
Here’s another justification:
5. Cut and Paste multiple items across customizations - When adding UD fields to ‘Entry’ forms, we also add the same to their ‘Tracker’ forms. It’s (again) tedious to have to enter the same things manually multiple times, when a copy-paste could accomplish the same in 5 seconds… Let me copy the group with all of it’s contents from one customization window and paste it into another customization. I’ll deal with incomplete bindings if that’s the case…
100% agree. I can’t believe there are not more votes.
I’d add:
In the properties window, tab key (or something) moves to next property
Give me a grid view of controls like Configurator has (see pic)
a. In that grid, include the built-in controls! I need to move those, too!
Can it just give me a label attached to the control already? I’ll blank it out if need be. Again, Configurator does that.
I’d like to see all of these in Configurator as well, and then I’d add:
Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V actually works in Configurator
I mean copying text! Yes, copying elements are great, too, but for crying out loud, can I copy descriptions, please?
I found that the old-school copy-paste commands work - Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert - but wow, and I just can’t remember that every time. I’ll right-click for all that.
Just wondering out loud here but how much development will be going into the WinForms tools if the future is web? The classic form will be with us for a while I’m sure but if you’re slicing the dev pie, how much do you give to the older client?
Right, I’m not great at HTML, etc. But I can sure customize WordPress to death. I can’t tell you how often I have thought, this would be so much easier in a web page.
At the same time, I have customized MES heavily because I can give people access to nearly anything, except financial modules and Engineering Workbench, and the MES licenses are 1/10 the cost of a full license .
Isn’t that basically what REST/Kinetic is? If we could we use professional web 3rd party web tools to customize things, seems like more complex things would be a lot easier to accomplish (I’m thinking Dreamweaver vs hand coding back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s). I guess we’ll have to wait for 10.2.600 to find out…
Yeah, with REST, you really don’t need SharePoint publisher. If you want to do that you’d use the SharePoint Framework to make a custom web part that uses REST. But I really like the idea of a ME-360 (Microsoft-Epicor) which is a better M365 integration leveraging Graph (SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, etc.), Automate, Power-BI, Azure Functions, etc.
