At the moment I have worked out \r for Wrap. Can I please have a guide to what can be used in the Message Line: Current Point Balance:\r{ENTITY DATA:Customer:Points}
Happy to only be advised of all the commands that can be used so I can work within that restriction.
This will again serve as a better âcollectiveâ in this post as what can be done. thanks in Advance.
(Sunday: my lawns & Christmas lights are calling )
You cant format the show message action, youre better using the ask question action. I use this loads, much more formatting options, font, size, background colour, full screen colour instead of just the âbannerâ across the middle of the screen
You could even use the ticket header to display that i for when your entity is added and have another setup to remove it or change it when order added for example
I even played about with messages using the ticket header set to fill the full ticket space on screen and then âresetâ to normal size when order added etc
Fairly certain that is all that Show Message supports. As @RickH mentions, if you need more options, you have Ask Question action.
I cannot think of any real justification for having more formatting support for the Message when we have Question. Though ânice to haveâ for Message, I would be curious to know if you have any real usage case where Question would not work in place of Message?
The only thing I can think of is that Question is not âmovableâ whereas Message can be drug to the side, but even so, both are âmodalâ (ie. they block operation). For example, for the screenshot below, I wanted to use Message because of itâs movability, but Question had to suffice in a very transparent configuration because I wanted to see the screen behind itâŠ
Ill be honest its much better for you to just try things. I mean formatting options are universal they will either work in some places or they wont but syntax is the same. So trial and error is your best friend here. Waiting for guides will limit your learning.
In fact we find things even Emre didnt realize were possible by simply trying them.
Hey @QMcKay - since I stumbled across the Cache issue I thought I could deal with keeping the Customer informed of their points, balances, (other wallets to come) with Popups - show message. So by using show message I can place Automation Commands on Ticket Screen, Payment screen etc which which when used will âShow Messageâ of current balances.
Yes, again thought you may say that @kendask. To tell you the truth I am a little âgun shyâ as recently I burn many hours testing something, thinking âwhat the heck?â (and seriously doubting my skill set) but later found out it was broken. Time and speed to market is everything at the moment and I cannot afford to loose time as this is my job. I cannot walk away and do me other job and come back to see if I solution eventuates.
Maybe I have misconstrued where we wish to take SambaPOS V5?
The process I am using is:
Design Feature according to Venue (have 18 items - 12 Completed);
Search Forum vastly V3,V4,V5 and collate best threads for application;
Commence build;
Test Features in all aspects;
Post Thread if opinion is more information required;
Rebuild Feature with new information supplied;
6.(a).Complete Feature
6 (b).Recycle 3 -5 after satisfactory efforts .
Typically I would use the documentation set provided with commercial software like âreligionâ. I read, study and implement very fast. Unfortunately the document set here is limited, and its the input from the forum which is paramount.
Trust me I am very uneasy about asking for help and only use an AT-mentions if I am getting frustrated and feel I have exhausted all options. I also use them to link in a user with a possible design idea.
So getting a quick reply from vastly more experience users like yourself is one of the most valuable aspects of SambaPOS in its current genesis. By some like Rick coming back and saying, categorically not it does not support âthatâ I move on. By emre saying no, it only supports â\râ I can immediately ask for the next best option and move on.
Sorry for the long post kendash as I hope you know I really appreciate and value your contributions. I just wanted to give you my perspective and I believe as I said in others posts it will only benefit the greater audience looking at SambaPOS.
Respectively Paul.
What I am trying to show you and the greater audience is if you learn the underlying concepts you will notice a pattern. Those concepts are well documented. We wonât have a manual showing all possible situations because well it may never end.
Once you understand the underlying concepts and you see how it all fits together you will be able to move past looking for documentation and you can start really creating custom configurations.
It was for all the reasons you just mentioned above is why I spent so long on the Button Captions Syntax - that even you discovered some possibilities. From spending 3 days playing, asking, doing I managed to achieve; a good understanding of Report Template Syntax & Printer Template; and create my first Customer Reports! These I consider highly valuable.
But âhorses for coursesâ as we say over here - I just though the show message question was a little different - either does or does not. I am flying across the other side of Australia tomorrow to start training 4 teams members in SambaPOS so every second now counts⊠Anyway thanks for your continued support kendash I am sure the distance has a lot more to travel
I also agree Show Message action is limited. Thatâs why Iâve implemented Ask Question action. Ask Question action should be used if something more needed than just showing a message box on screen.
Actually thatâs all I wanted to do haha - what go me asking questions is I wanted the 4 reward points centered underneath the âCustomer Points Balance:â. See how I got here
I am sure in the next few days I going to investigate how to use {ENTITY DATA:Customer:Points} in a Automation Command Button Caption. It will save even using Show Message, then Show Message will be relegated to only being used for Debugging.
No you also want alignment, font, color for message itself and for the button. Probably youâll also want different buttons as you improve your setup. That is what ask question action does.
Donât take it like burning hours. You implemented something that infers with button caches so I (or someone else) wonât burn hours. I also burn hours unnecessarily for lots of stuff. We call it as âhelping each otherâ.
Cache is not a issue. It stores data locally so we wonât read button data from database every time we need to render buttons. But⊠there are cases where we donât want cache and read it every time from database. You found one of them.
Yes âburning hoursâ is a bit harsh considering my steep learning curve - could of used better language there!
It is just incredibly frustrating for me being a Developer like you not being able to Master a product. My only point about the cache is it was making me âsecond guessâ or doubt myself. In those cases I think it better to âask the questionâ - do you think? Again another reason why this post started.
Cache will not be an issue for next build⊠However I really donât like using buttons to present customer data. Every time you display customer selection screen you always looking for a single customer. This customerâs account balance or reward points is useful. So if we have 10 active customers on this screen we have to unnecessarily fetch remaining 9 customerâs info. This creates inefficiency.
I understand this is a great selling argument. Seeing other 9 customerâs account balance is not useful but such features impresses people. That gives a sense of full control. However what working great is more important than what sells great. There are zillions of crap POS that works great on demonstration but fails bad on production. Youâre frequenting forum for a long time. You know we donât deal with such âproduction timeâ issues a lot. The main reason of it is we only implement what customer âreally needsâ. So trying to implement a single silver bullet that solves every thing is a wrong approach. We need to display everything, everywhere to implement a silver bullet solution. Instead customer should see it at the time he needs it. So workflow should be tailored specifically for the customer.
I can see we communicate better with restaurant owners than tech people. Restaurant people knows what they need and they just ask for it. Tech people obviously wants a single solution that fits to all customers. This is the main reason of our long discussions.
So I meanâŠ
What I think is not important. What you think is also not important. What that specific customer thinks (needs) is the answer.
Agree, emre - my task is to get 100+ venues thinking all the same.
YES! just saw you add âneedsâ - I am an Systems Analyst by trade - so looking to use SambaPOS to create better efficiency and bigger profits for our sites. There are plenty of POS systems around but I am looking for the one I can create new methods to produce far better and profitable outcomes!
SambaPOS hopefully will be the answer
[ps: live version will not use Button Captions for Customers! - really used it to see what can be done with syntax and optional display data).
I also have a lot of venues but I can never say they all thinking the same. Someone may want to see account balance popup as soon as he enters payment screen and see points popup after adding first food order.
At the moment that screen is unfiltered as I was experimenting. If I was to use such a screen it would be for a particular purpose say balances over credit limit; Customers names contain âFredâ; Customers with unpaid tickets etc.
Ok we are slightly different here - even though our customers are owned separately they all operate by the same code and require the same things. If they require something different then (in time and when I am better qualified) SambaPOS will do it. But for now commercially we will pay for the license ourselves and supply it free to each site. There is a much stakes at play and thatâs why we are not the norm like JTRTech.
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