CU Estimating – Compatible Units Sub-Tab / Excessive Entry Required for Station, etc. (18392 033 000 / 20110908-05)

Prior to T&D 7.1.1, the Compatible Units sub-tab consisted of a Work Sets table and a Compatible Units table. When adding a row to the Compatible Units table, the Station and Work Set would default to the values from the highlighted row on the Work Sets table. This design was cumbersome because only a few Stations/Work Set combinations could be viewed in the upper table and CUs could only be entered/viewed for a single Station at a time. The re-designed T&D 7.1.1 UI eliminated the upper table and allowed the CU table to display all CUs (Station Details) for the entire Estimate Version at one time regardless of Station or Work Set but provided the Filter Row capability for users to filter as they see fit.

Although this design is much better than the previous one, there was an unintended consequence to this change. Now, when a user clicks "New Row" on the Compatible Units sub-tab, the Station defaults to the Station that has the focus on the Stations sub-tab and the Work Set defaults to 0. That means that to avoid having to manually enter the Station on CU rows for Stations other than the first, the user has to continuously go back to the Stations sub-tab to highlight a different Station and return to the CU sub-tab to add the CUs to it.

In the prototype for the UI re-design, this concern was addressed by adding 3 non-persistent attributes to the PlusDEstVersion object to store default values for Station, Work Set, and Work Function. These non-persistent fields were updated anytime the user modified the corresponding field on a related PlusDStnDetail record and used as default values when a new CU/StnDetail is added. Thus if a user adds a CU to Station 001, the next row added will default to Station 001. If the user then changes the Station to 002, the next row added will default to Station 002. The same is true with the Work Set and Work Function fields.