Using Activity Descriptions to Generate User Interfaces for ERP Software

Delivering tailor-made ERP software requires automation of screen and printed report creation to be cost effective. Screens generated directly from data structures tend to have poor usability. An approach is considered using a domain specific language to describe use cases. Paper-prototyping and usability testing results define the usability characteristics the DSL portrays. The DSL is capable of defining a variety of screen types and user interface elements including forms, lists, pivot tables, Gantt charts, calendars and graphs. This approach is currently used in production to generate an interactive “AJAX” web user interface as well as HTML, PDF and Excel reports from descriptions stored in XML files. We believe that further research could extend our results to include non-ERP type software.