Posted by Jim Locker (24.209.104.73) on March 13, 2004 at 10:20:32:
In Reply to: I don't understand personality modules posted by Devon on March 12, 2004 at 10:17:12:
: What is a personality module? I don't get it. Does this mean that I can add buttons to the program? Why would I want to do that?
The personality module for The Property Manager is a capability that we have been having trouble describing to people because it is unique and no one has seen anything like it before. If we show it to you, you'll go "Ooohhhh, now I get it." - and you'll be impressed. But we are aware of no other product on the market in the Windows environment that has a capability like this. I am not restricting that statement to just property management software packages; I mean literally "no other product".
Essentially, we provide an interface in the The Property Manager that, when enabled, permits you to program our application, extend it, and change its internal connectivity.
The closest example in current Windows software would have to be the capability to program the Microsoft Office components using Visual Basic for Applications. VBA gives you the capability to command the Office programs and configure an application around those programs that does a particular job.
Our personality module effectively programs The Property Manager and to that extent is like Office/VBA, but it goes further. With a personality module, you can create objects and place them on our forms, delete objects on our forms, add or delete menu items, and - and this is the truly unique part - you may replace our event drivers with your own.
What this means is that you can not only extend the functioning of our program to include features that satisfy your particular needs but you can actually modify the way our program works via a personality module. A common use is to extend one of our modules by placing a wrapper around it that calls our module then does other processing when it returns.
In principal, you could literally replace the entire functioning of our program with your own functioning using a personality module. This wouldn't be a terribly productive thing to do, but it would be possible.
Now, doing this does require programming knowledge and knowledge of the internal structures of The Property Manager, and knowledge of how the modules are connected. We provide this information with the Developer Edition. If you need a custom personality module, we can write one for you, so long as your requirements are clearly set forth.
The primary advantage of this technology is that it provides a viable alternative to larger organizations that have been contemplating custom development of software to satisfy their particular unique requirements. In this situation, we provide a mature package that does the entire property management job and we provide a convenient means to extend this package to meet particular unique requirements. Not only that, but by design all customization will be in the personality module - not the main program package - so full compatibility with future upgrades is maintained. You therefore gain all the advantages of a custom package (it does your exact job your exact way) while totally bypassing the major pitfall of a custom package (support and upgrades).
We guarantee backward compatibility of upgrades to The Property Manager with personality modules, so long as the personality module was written according to our defined programming standards. The one place where compatibility could break is if we take a previously blank piece of real estate on our form and put a control there. If you had previously taken that real estate for your own use, you would have to move your control. If we built the personality module for you, we would provide you an update with the control moved.