Data Entry (Time)

ViperMAN

Hi Everyone,

I'm writting a web application (.NET) at the moment that requires the user to input a time for everyday of the week. Just wondering if anyone knows of a nice way to achive it...I don't like the idea of loads of textboxes across a page.

I heard of a system where a bar could appear representing a day with 15min segments on it and when the user mouses over them they change color and when save is hit it saves the highlighted ones as the time.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Brian

Ginger

Design it as a web service and link it to Outlook so that they can put the info using their calender...

Other ideas.. working with Outlook style again.. Telerik have a nifty control for this

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/examples/outlook2007/defaultcs.aspx

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/examples/contextmenu/defaultcs.aspx

ViperMAN

Thanks Ginger...they look suitable...I'll give them a look. If anyone else have any ideas please stick them up!

Cheers!

Ginger

Are tracking time like a clocking system or project management system or using it as a scheduling like for meetings etc?

ViperMAN

I'm planning on using it so users can log what hours they worked in a week and then in a separate section they can also log how much time they gave to various projects.

Ginger

Ok then I would look at the Scheduling one from telerik and use the context menu for assigning the time to projects so that its one UI...

If you have a clocking system (card etc) you could load the data into the UI for them and have them assign the data.

Additionally if you integrate their Outlook calender (if you outlook and exchange) you can populate the certain times with meetings / appointments etc... Means the amount of data that they have to enter is reduced which means better take on

KJF

Hey ViperMan, I'm a big beliver in doing the simplest thing that works. The outlook style calendar seems like overkill to me if all you want to do are record a start and finish time. Why not just use a slider? For example:

http://www.filamentgroup.com/examples/slider/index2.php

Ginger

It depends on how you want to visualise your time sheet / project sheet and also your target audience..

Are they consultants with multiple projects where it might be easier to say I am billing 5 hours to this project and 3 to this one then you might look at testboxes or the slider option.. Unless your customers want itemised billing then you may need another system type. I am thinking along the lines of a dev house who have a SCCM and bug tracking system linked (like TFS for example) where you could link bug completions to time allowing billing etc.

The Outlook metaphor is something a lot of users are familiar with and especially if you link in existing data and remove the need to data duplication or re-entry.

As long as its not tedious then most people wont care

ViperMAN

@KFJ

The slider is a good option if you had to select a time for one day but as the application stands, we are showing a week at a time and if you had a several projects there would be far too many sliders on screen and the user would get overwhelmed. But that slider could be handy in other sections, thanks for the tip!

@Ginger

I'll have a look at the Outlook way...Cheers!

Thanks for the advice guys!

colm_c

You should take a look at some of the online apps that do scheduling to get an idea of what works

http://getharvest.com
http://www.14dayz.com/

There's lots of these around.

ViperMAN

@colm_c

These look pretty good...thanks!