Part 1 — Understand BigWave · Chapter 3

Grids, Views, and Controls

Nearly every panel in BigWave is a grid. Work orders, customers, sites, assignments, invoice lines, documents. They all behave the same way, so ten minutes spent here pays off on every screen in the product. Grids are also BigWave’s reporting engine, and chapter 23 builds on what this chapter teaches.

Grid basics

A grid is a table of records. Click a column header to sort. Cells that reference another record, a customer name, a work order ID, a site, are links. Click through, do what you need, come back. The pager at the bottom moves through large result sets.

Above most grids sits a filter area specific to that screen. On All Work Orders you can narrow by status or project before the grid fills. Filters control which rows you see.

Views: your saved column layouts

Views control which columns you see, and they’re what makes a grid yours. A view is a named layout: the fields to show, in what order, plus one sort field. The view selector above the grid switches between them instantly.

Creating one:

  1. Open the view editor from the grid’s view selector.
  2. Name it. Dispatch board, Billing review.
  3. Pick fields from the available list. Custom fields you’ve defined show up here too. A view of work orders showing your own Permit Number field next to status and site is a report nobody had to build.
  4. Choose the sort field.
  5. Set the options:
    • Shared makes the view available to everyone, not just you.
    • Initial makes it the default view people see when they first open this grid.
    • Can modify controls whether others may edit a shared view or only use it.

Note the division of labor. Views remember columns and sort. The screen’s filter area remembers nothing, so set filters each time or rely on the screen’s defaults. If you’re applying the same filter daily, ask whether a status default or a dedicated view plus sort gets you there instead.

Have an admin build the handful of shared views each role needs, dispatch, billing, field, and mark the right one Initial per grid. New employees then see sensible screens on day one instead of forty columns of everything.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): Priya keeps a shared Inspections this month view on All Work Orders: site, status, scheduled date, assigned tech, sorted by date.

Residential (the Okafors): Grace’s Ready to invoice view shows completed residential work orders with customer, completion date and unbilled totals.

Exporting

Any grid exports to a spreadsheet with the columns of the current view. That one sentence is most of BigWave’s ad-hoc reporting story. Build the view, export it. Recurring exports and the heavier import and export machinery are chapter 22 and the Part 4 reference.

Date and time controls

Date fields all use the same control. Type the date directly or pick from the calendar popup. The control accepts quick entry, so typing a day number on its own stays in the current month, and it validates as you type, so a bad date can’t be saved. Schedule forms pair a date with a time where it matters. Chapter 16 covers how schedule dates behave, including windows and actual against scheduled.

Habits

  • Sort by clicking, filter above the grid, switch views for a different job. Three different tools. Keep them straight and grids stay fast.
  • Build a view the second time you rearrange columns by hand. The first time is exploration. The second time is a pattern.
  • Share views deliberately. A dozen thoughtful shared views beat eighty personal ones with overlapping names.

Next: who sees all these screens, and what each role’s BigWave looks like.