John Clark
John.Clark at niagaracounty.com
Thu Mar 6 10:04:00 CST 2003
I haven't bothered y'all for a couple of weeks now, but I have painted myself into a corner, on the program that I am currently working on. I missed something in my early assessment of the old program that I am replacing, and I did not see something that was there. I have gone a different way with something, and now I am having difficulty accomplishing the same results. The old form looked like it had quite a bit of information on it, but when I actually looked close, there was quite a bit of waste. For instance, the change that I made was to convert 12 checkboxes into a single drop-down box. I'm really not sorry for this decision, because it served a couple of purposes, beyond simple aesthetics...the old "hardcoded" labels for the checkboxes are actually names that are no longer in use...it is a Social Services program, and they like to change their program names (i.e. Since I have been here, Public Assistance became Temporary Assistance, which is now known as Family Assistance...All it is, is Welfare with more PC titles...they should just call it BS, and everybody knows what that means). With the combo box, they can change the names, whenever they desire, and they can add and delete programs too...a couple of the current ones aren't used anymore. The problem is that, on one of their reports, they total out the check boxes for each section (i.e. 95 Denied HR cases in the Lockport office...the report is sectioned by Offices). Now that I have gone with the drop-down method, I cannot simply add up the check boxes. And, I cannot say count each x, because it can now change, and I don't know what "x" is...may not do so very much, but it can. Somehow I need to count each existing "x". I need to know that there are 5 x's, 6 y's, and 8 z's, but the next year I might also have a "q" that was added and I'll need to count that. Any ideas?