The Visual Scheduling Add-in Developers Toolbox (VSADT) with AL-API lets you develop a customized planning board for your specific industry solution within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Our most recent update introduces three visual enhancements aimed at enhancing the user-friendliness of Gantt charts even further.
Unified mouse hover effects
Until now, there has been a lack of a uniform appearance in terms of visual feedback when you move the mouse pointer over a graphic element with which you can interact.
In some cases, only the cursor changed while hovering over an element, e.g. to indicate that an element can be moved or resized. Sometimes the color of an element changes, as with the time ranges or navigation buttons in the timescale. And in other cases, nothing happened at all. So, it was time to improve and standardize the visual feedback of VSADT.
Now the background of each element that the user can interact with is highlighted a little bit as soon as the user hovers the graphic element with the mouse cursor. In detail, there are now improvements for the following elements:
- Clickable symbols in the symbol column of a table (see also properties ClickableInTable and ClickableInEntitiesTable for Symbol objects)
- Buttons for collapsing/expanding child rows
- Table column headers when sorting can be switched interactively
- Splitters
- Timescale ribbon cells and navigation buttons in the timescale
- Bars
- Draggable date lines
- Cursors on table rows for row dragging now follow the same schema as for bar dragging
The following animation shows a brief overview of the most important elements:
Visualization of links with missing source or target bars
So far, it was possible to see the graphical representant for a link even if one of the connected bars was not displayed because it was hidden by filtering.
For example, let's assume we have three activities that are linked as follows:
If now Activity 2 is filtered, we can still see both links, assuming the setting LinksWithDanglingStartOrEndVisible has been set to true:
In addition, the horizontal positions of the circles indicate the point in time where the links are connected to the hidden bars.
Let’s now assume that we have a slightly different situation, where Activity 2 is not defined at all (no activity object for this activity has been added to the VSADT). However, we still want to show the user that Activity 1 has any successor at all, or that Activity 3 has a predecessor at all. This is now also considered by VSADT:
Outgoing links are drawn from the source bar downwards to the bottom of the current row, while incoming links are drawn from the top of the current row to the target bar. As before, the “missing” bars are represented by circles. The horizontal positions of these circles are determined by the points in time of the visible source or visible target.
Tooltips now also on symbols
Like the other objects provided by VSADT, the Symbol object can now also have tooltips. To add a tooltip template to a symbol, please use the new TooltipTemplateID property of the Symbol object.
Note: It does not matter where a symbol is used - in the symbol column of the table, on the bars, or as bar shapes - the tooltip template will be evaluated in any use case in the same way. If you would like to use the same visual symbol in different contexts – for example in the symbol column and as a bar shape -, then it might be advisable to create two different symbol objects both using the same graphic file (see the URL property of Symbol), so that you can apply completely different structured tooltips in both cases.
Features in previous releases
