The LA Fox Developer

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

June 1997

VFP Forms for Any

Screen Resolution

By Nelson M. Johnson, CCP

While I was learning MS Access, I saw a really cool demonstra-

tion of a form that would proportionally resize all the controls on

the form each time the form size was changed so that no matter

how small or large the form was, the user could still use all the

controls. I was stunned. This was the answer to my Windows-

client prayers. Now I could develop a form for one resolution

and regardless of what screen resolution the user had, my form

would always look right. I initially tried copying the code into the

forms I wanted to have this ability, but reality struck. Access

has this nasty requirement that ALL procedure names through-

out the application must be unique. This meant that if I really

wanted this to work, I would have to do some serious re-writing.

Along comes Visual FoxPro. I wrote a simplified procedure to

do this very trick and have included it below. There are four

properties you will need to add to your form: PrevHeight,

PrevWidth, BaseWidth, and BaseFontSize. You should manu-

ally set the BaseFontSize to whatever font size is your default

for the form. Then add these two procedures to your form and

you are off. There are a couple things you need to be aware of:

This will not handle container objects such as option groups and

page frames. Also, some controls have an AutoSize property

which this will set to .T., but the ones that don’t (like text boxes)

will have problems in the handling of the height property be-

cause rounding error will cause the size to “creep” if you resize

the form several times. I started to address this problem in fonts

by tracking the original base font size and then use an absolute

scaling factor, but I haven’t perfected it - I will leave that to you

to share with us. Unlike its Access cousin, this code should

allow you to drop it into many forms or classes and impress

your clients and coworkers, especially if they have been using

an FPW application.

Procedure Form.lnIt()

this.prevHeight = this.height

thls.prevWldth = thls.wldth

this.BaseWldth = thls.wldth

Procedure Form.Resize()

local Inl && a loop counter

local lcName && the name of the object

(Con't, page 7)

In this issue

At LA Fox

June 16, 1997, 7:30 PM - Mike Meer. Mike is the Vice Presi-

dent of Microcomputer Engineering Services, LLC, a company

specializing in highly-customized, mission-critical applications

for such diverse clients as Fox Broadcasting and the State of

Nevada. This night, he will be discussing builders, builderb (by

Ken Levy), and other tricks to help you develop VFP screens/

applications quicker. He will breakdown the process of selecting

and modifying objects during development. If time permits, he

will also show how this knowledge can translate to on-the-fly

adding of objects during runtime. Code examples will be avail-

able after the meeting on the LA Fox Website.

July 21, 1997, 7:30 PM - Miriam Liskin. Miriam is extremely

well-known for her contributions to the FoxPro community. She

writes a regular column for FoxPro Advisor and has authored

many books on the subject of FoxPro application development.

Her most recent books are Miriam Liskin’s Visual FoxPro

Expert Solutions (Que) and PC Magazine Programming FoxPro

2.5 (Ziff-Davis). Topic: An introduction to two basic strategies

for publishing FoxPro data on the Internet. The first involves

using FoxPro programs to generate static HTML pages,

which can then be placed on any Internet server. The second

involves using third-party tools to facilitate dynamic access to

FoxPro data. She’ll talk about the advantages and disadvan-

tages of these two approaches and suggest some strategies for

overcoming the Iimitatipns of currently available tools.

Since We Last Met....

For those of you who missed him, Drew Speedie provided an

(Con't page 2 ) ____

Out and About

by Barry R. Lee

The June meeting of LA Fox will be held on

June 16, 1996, at 7:30 PM at our regular

meeting place (the Torrance Airport, 3301

Airport Drive, in Torrance). For details on

how to get there, see the map on the back

page.

Lead, Follow...

Page 3

Ken Levy’s CIassX Seminar

Page 4

KeyPress Event Parameters

Page 8

and much more!