First, a video, because this will explain a whole lot better than what I'm about to type:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1YT3-GPKt0
This is a timeclock running in the Servoy webclient on full screen in the browser on the iPad. Functionally it works very well so far, and we've been running it for a few days and everybody is very impressed with our first Servoy project - it's already leaps and bounds better than the two previous systems, both pictured here:
The plan is fairly rapidly to write this as a native iOS app, but in the interim (until I go off for some iOS training next month!) we're going to run it like this. The issue (and you can see it very clearly on the video) is that the first taps to begin entering the user ID are delayed - this is obviously because each onAction has to go to the server and back to display the new value. This time is pretty negligible when you're in the building - over wireless N its pretty responsive. This video is of it running over 3G at a remote site, so there's a pretty big performance hit. Not deal-breaking but annoying.
Is there a way I can (easily) capture the user_id string locally, before sending it to the server for the clockin routine? The easy answer is "use a text box and the iPad built in keyboard" but that sorta ruins the whole point.
currently its just a concat method adding a button parameter to a string, which is used in search on the next form.
Any thoughts?