Drag And Drop Colored Grouped Blocks

[Young Padawan]

I made a picture to better describe what I'm trying to accomplish. Basically I work for an industrial shop that has about 30 machines that jobs are running or reserved on. I'm trying to make a scheduling program where someone can insert, delete, and move around jobs on a whiteboard. Since the people who'll be using the program are not usually around computers I'm trying to make it as simple as possible. I thought about having drag and drop blocks (sometimes a group of blocks if a job is spanned across several machines at different times) but to be honest I'm not sure if it's even possible (although I think almost everything is possible in FM7 if you're creative enough).

The added benefit of this scheduling program is that people will be able to see the affect new jobs have on older ones or what happens to all the rest of the jobs if a particular job is moved. And they'll be able to see which machines are being under utilized and which ones are swamped with work.

Thanks for any insight.

[iNik]

Drag & Drop is pretty much impossible in Filemaker. You might be able to accomplish something similar by using check boxes by each production machine and forcing a validation that ensures enough boxes are checked for the total output required by a job. That way you could uncheck one machine/scheduling slot and check another. If they tried to keep going without fixing the problem, it could bug them about it.

Would be pretty darn tricky to implement, though...

[Fenton]

If you think of the "blocks" as scripted buttons, you can do something. That is, when you click the 1st time it starts a process, perhaps removing that item (if any) from that block. Then, when you click a 2nd time, it can put it down where you click. As iNik says, it's a little tricky to get it to do exactly what you have in mind each time. There is also the possibility of using a Modifier key to get a different behavior.

I once built a game of checkers that worked OK (for me), and that was on version 5. I also build a kind of scheduling file that used clicking and Shift-clicking to fill colored blocks. It didn't really move stuff around, but it did check for the end of the space (time) available.

In 7, with Script Parameters, you have an easy way to identify each block. That will save much repetitive scripting.

It partly depends on how complex the logic is about how things move. That I believe is going to have to be scripted, and it would have to follow certain set rules.

In your example you first moved 101 to the place that 108 was on. Then 108 had to move up one. What if there wasn't room there? An error would have to stop them. It seems to me that it would be easier to have them move 108 first, then move 101. Also, I don't see why they had to move on Machine C; they weren't overlapping. But what do I know :-?

I think something is possible, but anything fancy is going to happen because of scripting, not really drag-n-drop; though it may look somewhat like it.

Here's another thing that might help. A free plug-in which allows you to highlight backgrounds by calculation.

http://24uSoftware.com/SimpleHighlight

Checkers.zip

[comment]

I made something very similar to what you describe - a simulation of a magnetic board for assigning courses to teachers. First click lifts the assignment, and places it into a holding cell in the header. Second click places it at the destination. (It's actually the same script, any click causes a complete exchange of contents between the clicked field and the holding cell).