M-Commerce Unleashed

WIKI’s Definition: Mobile Commerce is any transaction, involving the transfer of ownership or rights to use goods and services, which is initiated and/or completed by using mobile access to computer-mediated networks with the help of an electronic device.
Layman’s terms: M-Commerce is an act of buying and selling goods, services or information without any location restrictions, by any mobile device which uses a wireless connection to establish communication between all the necessary parties to complete the transaction.

M-Commerce Transaction (Transaction from a Buyer’s point of view)
Transaction Actors
Buyer (User)
Seller (Content Provider)
Network (Internet / Mobile Service Provider)

Transaction from a Buyer’s point of view.
Transaction Legend
Data Communication layer: Internet / Service Provider Network / Any unique system to complete trading successfully.
Point of Sale (POS): Place / Instance at which the goods / service is traded (purchased successfully)
Proof of Purchase (M-Ticket): Received at POS, as acknowledge/receipt for the trading.
Point of Entry (POE): Place where the M-Ticket is redeemed to avail the service (time of delivery).

M-Commerce Technical Aspects
The idea line behind any m-commerce application is the ability to make commerce transaction through mobile. To be more specific, uniquely identifying & authentication the commerce transaction based on the user’s MSISDN. Technically the billing system which involves a seamless transaction back and forth between the mobile and the payment gateway is the key. Different ways to accomplish M-Commerce are
1> SMS channel: This is commerce between consumer and supplier over SMS. SMS channel is used as a medium for interaction to place order & for payment.
2> WAP channel: This is commerce between consumer and supplier over WAP medium. WAP channel is used as a medium for interaction; the mobile user interacts with supplier’s WAP site and place order and makes the payment.
3> Internet channel: This is the commerce between consumer and supplier over the Web. Mobile user interacts with supplier’s website over Internet using a PC, his mobile number is used as identifier for the transaction and it might need SMS or WAP channel to complete the transaction.
All three channels have their limitations as well as benefits:
Though SMS channel(PUSH marketing) has larger coverage area, same time it difficult to place order as the user have to remember keywords & item code for placing orders.
WAP channel (PULL marketing) need active GRPS connection on mobile, same time its more user friendly.
Internet channel cannot be used everywhere as user need active internet connection, same time it’s more user friendly and has better UX (User Experience).

Real-time Scenario
Just think how exciting it will be if you can place order for a cup of cappuccino using your mobile device on our drive back home and by the time we reach, hot cappuccino awaits at the door steps.
Mr. Swami decides the same and sends an SMS to 9898 with text “CAPCINO 1” to the coffee pub to which he has enrolled thereat. After few seconds he receives an acknowledgement SMS with text “Order for 1 cappuccino will be delivered in 15 mins and you are charged Rs. 50”. On his arrival to his residence, a delivery man offers Mr. Swami a hot cup of cappuccino to drink, taste, enjoy and refresh.

RADTreeView –Print Utility

Utility Overview:
RADTreeView control is a popular product of Telerik which I have used in my sample .Net WinForm application. Though there were a plenty of print tree utilities available on the net there was not much for printing RADTreeView controls. The snippets that are available were either making use of the Win APIs or printing a simple .Net treeview control, neither of them was of my interest. At the dieing moment’s of my depth first search, thanks to Mark Pitman blog for giving insight on capturing and preparing a tree image for printing. With this I went ahead in writing my own pseudo code to print RADTreeView .

Printer Utility:
I would like to split this pseudo code explanation into 2 segments,

1. Preparing the treeview for print
This step is crucial though for the reason, to capture the complete snapshot of the data or content within a treeview or any control for that matter which has the nature to grow and expand using horizontal and vertical scrollbars is not a cakewalk. It’s tricky and needs a bit of work around. In order to capture a snapshot of the complete node collection of the treeview, first we need to get hold of the virtual width and height of the tree in its expanded state; the Width and Height or the ClientSize.Width and ClientSize.Height properties of the treeview just gets the size of the treeview that is visible or rendered on the UI, they are completely ignorant of the virtual width and height of the expanded tree. Thanks to RADTreeView control which has a ready to use property as such as VirtualWidth and VirtualHeight for this purpose.

Work around Algorithm:
a) Get the Handle / Reference of the RADTreeView .
b) Store the current settings (original width, height and docking styles) in some temp variables.
c) Draw a virtual snapshot of the tree to a bitmap image, by resizing it to its virtual width and height.
d) Reset the tree to its default original settings for to be rendered as similar as it was rendered initially.

Code Snippet:
// storing the original tree settings in temp variables.
int tempHeight = tree.Height;
int tempWidth = tree.Width;
DockStyle tempDockStyle = tree.Dock;

// creating a virtual tree to capture all node details.

int scrollOffset = 10; // an offset to capture the entire tree image eradicating scrollbar mishaps.
tree.Dock = DockStyle.None; // helps to resize the tree to its virtual width and height.
tree.Width = tree.VirtualWidth;
tree.Height = tree.VirtualHeight + scrollOffset;

// Capturing the complete tree’s snapshot into a bitmap
memoryImage = new Bitmap(tree.Width, tree.Height);
tree.DrawToBitmap(memoryImage, new Rectangle(0, 0, tree.Width, tree.Height - scrollOffset));

// setting back the default settings of the original tree.
tree.Width = tempWidth;
tree.Height = tempHeight;
tree.Dock = tempDockStyle;

Above snippet is self explanatory though, there are 3 key things to watch out for,

a) Dock Style: It’s a very important property that needs to be attended. When we try to expand the tree view to its virtual width and height, and if the tree control is docked to its parent container, we should ensure that tree view’s dock property is set to DockStyle.None. Only after undocking, the tree view can be resized to its virtual width and height for the snapshot.

b) scrollOffset: Its any arbitrary integer, not required though, but I had to use it in order to
Eliminate scroll bar mishaps. Ideally the virtual width and height should get the complete tree nodes, eliminating the scrollbars but was not happening in my case. I had to do some work around like, add this scrollOffset to the virtual height during tree expansion in order to capture the missed out fragment of data at the bottom end of the tree and also subtracting the same from virtual height during bitmap generation for cropping out the visible horizontal scrolls from the print document.

c) DrawToBitmap: Performs rendering of the specified control to a bitmap object of specified size into the rectangle boundary specified.

Bitmap treeImage = new Bitmap(tree.Width, tree.Height);
tree.DrawToBitmap(treeImage, new Rectangle(0, 0, tree.Width, tree.Height - scrollOffset));

2. Printing the treeview image
Now, we are ready to print the prepared snapshot. For this I am sticking to the .Net books by making use of the PrintDocument and PrintPreviewDialog classes of System.Drawing.Printing assembly. PrintPreviewDialog class helps to show a preview of the document that is to be printed; we can also programmatically make printer configurations and other custom settings using PrintDialog class which are out of box stuffs pertaining to our context.

PrintDialog printd = new PrintDialog();
DialogResult res = printd.ShowDialog();
if (res == DialogResult.OK)
{
PrintPreviewDialog pp = new PrintPreviewDialog();
pp.Document = this._printDoc;
pp.Document.PrinterSettings = printd.PrinterSettings;
pp.Show();
}

PrintDocument class does the actually printing business; three important events that are to be handled are,
a) BeginPrint: Any initialization code required for printing, like document Page numbers can be set here.
b) PrintPage: The document printing operation takes place here.
Draws the specified portion of the specific image in the specified location with the specified size.

Graphics g = e.Graphics; // System.Drawing.Printing.PrintPageEventArgs e
g.DrawImage(treeImage, destinationRect, sourceRect, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);

c) EndPrint: Memory flush out operations can be performed here.
Hope this article along with pseudo code throws a bit of light in creating utility class for printing RADTreeView control.