By 1994 University Stores had gotten into stockless purchasing agreements with vendors and needed a way to bypass the old mainframe inventory system for these types of inventory charges. Vendors provided Stores with weekly orders on disk in a specified format. The Stockless Purchasing System allowed stores personnel to import and upload the charges directly to the mainframe accounting system. The stockless purchasing system was the last system I wrote for MMAD before I moved on to the University Health Center. This system afforded me a real sense of satisfaction in that it marked a significant maturity in my programming style. It could run on the server and could determine the client platform. Additionally, the code was written very generically and was very reusable for any new entry code through use of pointers. It was also extremely flexible - allowing users to retrieve and to back-out charges, and hold individual orders for clarification and later upload, etc. It also made generous use of SQL for reporting and data formatting. I even went to Chicago for a three day workshop in Fox Pro prior to writing this system.
In case you arrived here through the back door ...
