The Russian market has entered a stage where all customers wish to independently develop their information systems, without any use of integrators and vendors. For modern systems of economic documentation, visual editors of business processes, as well as document cards, have become very popular. Visual programming, or rather its main idea, originated in the eighties, but still there is an active development and development of various products in various fields. As a result of their use, the following thesis is more and more confirmed: the higher-level product is used, the greater restrictions are placed on implementation. This fact has many consequences for Russian EDMS systems. Let's look at a list of typical queries that most often cause changes:
- creating new documents or changing existing ones - this is done on the server side;
- a description of the list of possible actions on instructions and documents (user interface, task cards);
- work with types of documents;
- reference books.
Visual programming: working with a visual editor
When it comes to creating cards and linking them to certain description fields, you need to work with an editor, which in turn must support a well-defined set of functions:
- a description of the procedure for selecting values from directories with a convenient interface and the ability to filter;
- breakdown of the card into logical sections. For example, separate bookmarks for information fields, for the history of a document, for a route, for related orders and other things;
- support for entering records that may contain links to some extraneous objects. For example, a record in the review history should refer to another record, a visa, records in other fields should also be with links to some objects;
- must necessarily be present the opportunity to describe the relationships between the various fields;
- the ability to edit hierarchical structures is another important detail that visual programming should make available;
- a description of the relationships that are formed between the fields, that is, an indication of which fields for which documents will be editable;
- setting the visibility of the fields depending on what conditions are set;
- Complex versions of data validation combined with several fields.
There is as yet no suitable solution for building web interfaces with similar capabilities.
Visual programming: working with a description of business processes
Manufacturers of various systems are constantly working on the creation of various visual process editors . When using such editors to develop Russian systems, programmers are faced with a whole set of problems. Many practices that are widespread in the Russian document management system cannot be described in terms of business processes, which is why it is difficult to use a visual programming language. The work with the Russian document management system is so complicated that now there is no way to do it the way it is done abroad, that is, to create forms that work interconnectedly and not each time cause the forms and documents necessary to solve one problem. This approach does not improve work efficiency. If you try to visualize those processes that lend themselves well to this, then such investments will not pay for themselves, since these processes do not need frequent changes.
There is a certain set of tasks for the solution of which it is appropriate to use visual programming C, and in other cases it can even not be touched.