How would you design this Windows form?

Question

I need ideas on how to best design a Windows form for my particular situation.

On a cattle feeding yard there will be between about 300 and 600 pens.  On my "Pen Feeding Sequence" form, I want the user to be able to setup and maintain the order in which the pens should be fed (ultimately in the Pen table is a column named Sequence that gets an interger value).

So on the form...

Sequence     Pen
1            A101
2            A102
3            B245
4            C763

Easy enough.

I suppose I could have a datagrid of Pens ordered by sequence and the user would click to edit each row and put a number (or blank) for the sequence number.  But that's the easy way out for me the developer.

I want what would be slick for the user.  Some sort of dragging of a pen to a number?  I could see that easily if the number of pens would fit on one form but we're talking hundreds here.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Ron

 

Answer 1

Just throwing out a easy to use analogy here:

Would you be able to use an analogy similar to setting tab order on a form where you click on the items (pens) in order.  don't know how this would go with your hundreds of pens though.  (maybe you could allow multi select a bunch of pens when assigning order - eg. This bunch first, then select another range, this bunch second).

not sure if that made any sense or helped... . 

Kym

Answer 2

I would have to assume that the locations of the pens and the feed store are pretty important to determine an optimum sequence.  So display the pens and stores in a grid and connect the pens with lines to show the sequence.  You'd do this with custom painting in the Paint event for the form.  Let the user edit the sequence with the mouse in a "connect-the-dots" fashion.