Product Management
The Products page is where all product records within MESS are created, versioned, and managed. From here, authorized users can:
- Create brand new products from scratch.
- Generate new versions of existing products.
- Activate or deactivate products for production visibility.
- Review all stored product information at a glance.
Below is a screenshot of the Products page.
The product table supports inline editing for all product fields. However, edits to existing products cannot be saved in place — they must be committed by creating a new product record based on the changes.
Key points:
- This approach prevents altering or deleting products that may be referenced in production logs.
- Product visibility to operators is controlled by the Active checkbox.
- Saving changes to an existing product always produces a separate version, preserving the original.
Each product has a column showing all available work instructions from the database. Here, users can:
- Select or deselect instructions to link them with the product.
- Adjust associations without impacting other product properties.
The last row in the table is always blank and acts as a creation form. When filled out and confirmed via the Create Product button:
- A new product record is generated.
- Work instruction associations can be set immediately after creation.
The UI for each row in the product table is built as a self-contained Blazor component. It handles both display and interaction logic for that product.
General behaviors:
- Tracks whether a row has unsaved changes.
- Disables repeated save clicks while an operation is in progress.
- Displays different buttons depending on whether the row is an existing product or a new one.
- Uses a confirmation dialog for destructive actions like deletion.
- Delegates all actual save, delete, and association operations to parent-level logic via callbacks.
1. Inline Editing Product name and active status can be changed directly in the table row. Any edit marks the row as “dirty,” enabling save actions.
2. Conditional Actions
- Existing products show Save and Delete controls.
- New products show a Create control instead.
3. Work Instruction Selector Each row integrates a selection UI to manage product–instruction links:
- Supports adding new instructions to the product.
- Supports removing selected instructions.
- Works in sync with the product's own data.
4. Confirmation Before Deletion Deletes require explicit user confirmation via a modal dialog, reducing risk of accidental removal.
5. Parent–Child Communication Instead of saving or deleting directly, the row component raises events that the parent table component listens to. This allows:
- Centralized data handling.
- Server communication logic to remain outside the row component.