Stephen Burman's Blog

Last week was spent attempting to get as much room out of the touch sale screen as possible. We made as many buttons line up as possible, and allowed for one of the product pad pages to be shown in the centre of the sale screen. This gives the user heaps of space to place as many button as they wish on the sale screen.

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Recently, we’ve had a complaint regarding PCEFTPOS. The issue was that sometimes the PCEFTPOS screen would flash the word ‘approved’ on the screen, and then disappear. The entire sale would disappear as well.

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One of our largest clients has requested a new feature for their fuel stations. This feature is recording odometer readings for customers.

The way this works, is that a customer can be flagged as allowing odometer readings. If this flag is turned on, then they will be asked for the following when that customer is selected:

• The vehicle that is being driven
• The driver of the vehicle

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We believe that we have made a breakthrough on the fuel slowdown issue.

While running the automated tests, we recorded which methods from the fuel interface were being called. From this information, we created a new automated test that only calls these methods from the fuel interface in the same order as they are called during the normal test.

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As part of the enhancements for the fuel module, to make it work faster, we decided to put the fuel audit printing and auto-stacking into a separate thread. This sounds relatively simple, but there were a few issues to deal with. The main one was that talking to the enabler (the fuel system interface we use) does not work when called from another thread.

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We have been trying to fix a problem with the fuel module. For some reason, it starts to perform slowly after a while at client sites. Even if Amicus was shut down, the computer would perform slowly until it was restarted.

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We are in the middle of fixing bugs right now, getting ready for the 6.02 release of Amicus POS. One bug was interesting in particular. One of our screens was being opened as a modal dialog. This was in C++ rather than .NET, so the modal dialog only locked out its parent. This allowed the user to open another modal dialog if they wished.

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One of our largest clients said that they were having an issue with a few of their customer accounts. It seems that the invoices were going missing. This was strange, but after examining the example problem sales they provided, data in the database, audit logs, as well as the error logs. I managed to figure out how a cashier managed to achieve this.
What they managed to do:

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Amicus POS has several other supporting applications. These range from PDA applications to services, and support programs. A lot of these are written in .NET, and therefore have an AssemblyInfo.cs file to store all the information about that program.

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Over the past week, we have had to put aside the conversion to a multilingual application in order to get Amicus Smartdocket working. There have been some changes made to the meal order and table service modules, and Smartdocket (the PDA version of the meal order module) has been relatively untouched.

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