LOTS Companion Sale Review

hi there!

I see you've stumbled on to my humble home on the net, Drive:Activated. My name's Sam, I'm an ambitious and driven uni student, residing in Melbourne, Australia, wanting to make my mark on our world. This is my site, which is mainly just my blog and some other bits. There's no definite theme to my blog, just anything that interests me, and currently that's web trends, startups, ideas and cool stuff. Check it out, leave me a comment, click on 'Who is this?' to find out more about me, or drop me a line by clicking on 'Let's Talk'. Hope you enjoy it!

My signature

LOTS Companion Sale Review

Last updated: Apr 16 2006, 11:04 PM (Over 30 months ago)

What is this?

This program was designed to let pharmacy owners determine the performance of their staff based on their companion sales. Using sales data, it summarises the sales within a given period, giving the average sales and companion sales quantity as well as the ability to drill down and view the sales for a certain staff member as well as the particular sales. Each of these views can be printed as well. It was designed for the Pharmasol LOTS system, and will not work with other POS systems.

Note that this program is in no way endorsed by or related in any way to Pharmasol apart from the fact that it extends LOTS. I will endeavour to answer any emails regarding this program, but only this program, not LOTS. Also note that although this program connects to the LOTS database, it only retrieves data - no data is changed. That said, use at your own risk and I take no responsibility for any outcomes resulting from this program.

What are the technical details?

Again, VB.NET and .NET Framework 1.1 was used. Using this project however, I decided to explore two different areas of the .NET Framework. One was the use of the .NET FX 1.1 DataGrid. As in previous projects I needed custom unbounded grids, I had used third-party controls. This time however, the requirements were lower, and the DataGrid suited the purposes perfectly, especially the ease of the drill down code.

DataGrid aside, as being able to print the results was a requirement, yet the program seemed too small to warrant the inclusion of the hefty Crystal Reports runtime, I decided to implement some custom printing code, manipulating the Graphics object. The result were some nice reports without increasing the file size by much, however given more complex reporting requirements, this wouldn't have been feasible.

Let me see it!

I want it!

Just to reiterate, this only works for the LOTS POS system.

If your LOTS installation is not in the default location of (C:\LOTS\lotsdb\lots.mdb), then add the path to the lots.mdb file in quotation marks as an argument when running this program, e.g. C:\Downloads\LOTSCompanionSaleReview.exe "C:\LOTS Master\lotsdb\lots.mdb".

Make sure you have the .NET Framework 1.1 installed.

Download: LOTS Companion Sale Review 1.0.2368.34756