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Hi Jon,

Haven't used their scheduler, but I do use the Gantt and a lot of the other components very extensively (WPF).

Personally I always use disconnected data in memory in the UI (ObservableCollection<> or List<>, depending on whether it's going to be modified or not), and save direct SQL access just for the moment of retrieval and saving changes back.

Nick

Hi Jon,
I would second what Nick said: when I started with X# and WPF, I used directly DataTable and DataRow objects connected to any sort of grids (including the one I buyed from SyncFusion), but it is a lot better to work with disconnected models like ObservableCollection models - much more flexible and also faster.
Wolfgang

A conclusion and summary of this project after my original questions asked in November ’22 and January ’23. Just in case it helps anyone thinking about a similar requirement.

The objective: To create a visual scheduling interface for rental companies to allocate employees and resources to the various jobs, delivery, collection and setup of equipment and the technicians required.

A medium sized rental company involved in commercial Audio visual must deliver, set up, operate and remove sound systems and video display/projection equipment for between 1-10 events per day.
This is carried out at various venues and locations across a city and requires variously skilled technical staff to operate the equipment as well as set it up correctly. Getting the mixture of the staff and equipment right is complex.

A visual control can provide an interface like Outlook with appointments able to be dragged around and arranged as needed with the ability to see availability of multiple employees simultaneously and allocate the work accordingly. The alternative is a large “text dump” of the jobs and a lot of thinking about who, what and where would work which takes a lot of concentration and mental energy, and laying it out in Word or Excel manually.

I had no idea where to start when I asked the question almost 5 months ago - What kind control to use and what data source would then be required to connect to the 3rd party control and if anyone had “best practice” tips on how to approach it.
This is the first major addition to my application since moving it from VO to X# during September 2022.

Thanks to everyone (mainly Chris, Wolfgang, Nick and Andrej) who provided valuable advice along the way and Robert for some special translation skills – this scheduling interface is now complete and in use at one (my own) rental company (so far) since the end of March.
It is a great success - the crew controller claims it saves him 4+ hours EVERY DAY instead of the old manual process we were following.

In addition to the reduced time requirement, we immediately noticed improved accuracy in scheduling and efficiency in our resource allocation-being able to see how all the staff are allocated at a glance is totally worth the effort this took.

The control I used: Dev Express XtraScheduler for Winforms
The data source: System.Data.DataTable, along with DBF’s.
I did all the development within XIDE, only using VS for unpacking the Dev Express DLL's and extracting the license etc.

My main challenge was the learning curve with the Dev Express control and their syntax, but easy enough to overcome. Dev Express support is responsive and helpful.
The other time-consuming aspect was converting parts of my application to use System.Datetime and altering the DBFs to store the allocated resources and new time information after editing in the control.
The time involved was well over 200 hours, but it provided a lot of beneficial and experience and learning opportunities along the way and of course, great satisfaction. Not all the time went on the control as there was significant backwards compatibility to add into my main application to facilitate the process and the associated features.

How it works:
• Select a date range of rental jobs and bookings to export into a DBF
• Open the schedule control and read the Dbf contents into a Datatable which is then bound to the control as the datasource.
• Freely assign resources to appointments, add notes, change times and move appointments around as required in the Dev Express control.
• Resources are employees, vehicles, contract labour and can be assigned to any job or appointment as needed.
• After editing, close the schedule control and the data can either be abandoned, or saved back to the “intermediate dbf”.
• The schedule can be edited again or what you have saved in the “intermediate” file can be uploaded into the rental application DBFs.
• The rental application can then produce the printed/Excel timetable for everyone.
(The schedule control does have reporting and export capability but I have not looked into that as the process was already defined in the rental application and easier to use)

I am very pleased with the (nearly) finished result and how solid and stable it is. The level of integration we have achieved between a .Net Winform control and my recently converted X#/VO application is quite impressive and appears seamless to all the users.

My next step is to learn how to publish the work schedules to a web location with an interface for the affected employees to access their current and upcoming schedules online. This will give them the opportunity for feedback on their scheduling and provide better advance warning of upcoming work, so stand by for the questions!
(A couple of sample screenshots attached)

Looks like GANNT View in Telerik