The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

July 1995

From the Quill of Bill....

More GENSCRNX

by Bill Anderson

Here’s another trick that uses GENSCRNX. The

example below is specific to the Macintosh environ-

ment (Ed Leafe, Steven Black, Bruce Onder, does

this trick work for you?), though the same idea will

work under Windows.

In one of my applications I built a generic Find

screen. These screen(s) would have one or two

data entry fields, four pushbuttons and a list box.

The data entry field(s) were used as a filter — enter-

ing “T” in the data entry field would just display

those results beginning with ‘T, etc. The four

pushbuttons are designated Find, New, Select and

Close. The Find button places the records which

match the filter condition into the list box. New

represents a new record. Select is used to select a

record from the list box (double clicking on an entry

in the list béx works as well), and the Close

pushbutton1is the bailout mechanism. So far, so

good.

When first entering this screen only the data entry

field(s), Find and Close pushbutton are enabled.

When Find button is pushed, the list box is enabled

(and filled) as well as the New and Select buttons.

This forces the user to browse the records before

selecting the New pushbutton. The Find button is

left enabled in case the user wishes to enter a new

filter condition. Again, it’s pretty straightforward.

Now the catch. The users wanted the ability to use

the Enter key to select the Find key before list box

was filled and have the Enter key work on the Select

pushbutton after the list box was filled ** with the

corresponding visual cues lOW, the Find key

should have the thick default border before the list

box was filled with the Select key having the thick

default border after the list box is filled -- a movable

visual default cue.

Here’s how I solved it:

First, the issues needed to make the Enter key work

is tangential to this discussion. Second, I only use

Chicago, 12 Normal for my pushbutton font and I

think I hardcoded the SYSMETRIC values for this

font. To make it work with different fonts would

require functions for these hardcoded values. Also

this would have to be modified for the Windows

platform because the pushbutton curvature is differ-

ent.

The Find and Select buttons should not be the

default pushbuttons in the Screen Builder -- neither

of them have the thick border. In the comment

button of the Find button I placed the following:

The Select button has the same function in the

comment snippet but it’s called FUNCTION

Def_Sskirt.

4

What does this function do? Depending on the

setting of the logical variable (Enable), a black border

is painted around the pushbutton or a border the

same color as the screen is painted around the

pushbutton. This function calls a UDF called SKIRT,

listed below. SKIRT is a common UDF.

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