The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

May 1998

18 VFP Productivity Boosters

bunch of time-saving tips that all VFP developers can use.

n the brochure for our Visual FoxPro training courses, we claim

hat our training “will make you a faster and more productive

developer" Fortunately, that’s an easy boast to live up to, given

that VFP is crammed full of useful shortcuts designed to save

the programmer valuable time.

ro be honest, none of these techniques will save you a huge

3mount of time on its own. But, used together over the course of

a development project, they could make a noticeable difference

to your productivity — as well as making VFP a pleasanter place

to work in.

So let’s get started

1 .For a fast way of opening a table in the VFP development

environment, just click on its name in the Project Manager.

2.Holding down Ctrl, Alt and Shift simultaneously will tempo-

rarily hide all open windows, which is great if you need to see

some output on the background screen. Release the keys to

bring the windows back.

3.lf the Command Window is lost deep in your desktop, hit

Ctrl-F2 to bring it quickly to the front.

4.Talking of the Command Window, you know that you can

scroll back and re-execute earlier commands. But did you know

that you can also execute entire blocks of commands? To do

so, highlight the block and hit Enter.

5.When working on the design surface within the Form

Designer, hit Tab to quickly bring the property window to the

front.

6.Press Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn in the property window to

cycle through the object list (in VFP 5.0 only).

7.To quickly locate a given property, press Ctrl, Shift and the

first letter of the name. Pressing Ctrl-Shift-F, for instance, will

take you to the first property whose name begins with F.

8.ln the code window in the Form Designer, PgUp and PgDn

will cycle through all the methods which actually contain code.

9.And double-clicking on an object on the design surface will

take you to the first method in alphabetical order which contains

code for the object.

I0.lf you go to Tools Options f Forms and de-select “Prompt

to save changes before running form”, the form will be automati-

cally saved each time you run it from the designer.

II .When dropping a class on the form, if you cannot find the

appropriate button on the toolbar, drag the class from the

Project Manager instead.

12.If you cannot figure out what’s gone wrong with the form, it

usually pays to focus on the properties and methods that have

changed from their defaults. In both 3.0 and 5.0, these are

highlighted in bold within the property window. In 5.0, you can

go one better by right-clicking on the property window and

selecting “Non-Default Properties Only”. This will hide every-

thing that is unchanged, making it easier to see what you have

altered.

13.How many times have you needed to type a field name in

your code, only to find that you could not remember the exact

name or the spelling? In 5.0, just right-click, select Build

Expression, and pick the field from the expression builder (this

assumes that the table is open in the development environ-

ment).

14.Or ... simply drag the field from the Project Manager (or

database container) and drop it in the editor.

1 5.Similarly, you can insert a fully qualified object name (such

as THISFORM.MyGrid.Columnl .NameField) by right-clicking in

the editor, selecting Object List, and picking the appropriate

name from the resulting dialog (in 5.0 only).

16.Need to comment-out a large block of code (in 5.0)? Select

the code in question, right-click, and pick Comment. Reverse

the action by picking Uncomment. The nice thing about this is

that the IJncomment command acts only on code that was

disabled by the Comment command, not any existing com-

ments within the block.

I 7.Developers moving from FoxPro 2.x to VFP 3.0 are often

dismayed to find that the Beautify feature has been retired. In

5.0, it makes a come-back. Look for it on the right-click menu

in the code editor.

I 8.If you don’t want to be nagged to run a wizard every time

you start a new form, report or whatever, visit Tools I Options I

Projects and de-select “Prompt for Wizards”. This affects the

New button in the Project Manager, but not the File I New

command or the New button on the main toolbar.

(Copyright, Mike Lewis Consultants Ltd. 1998.)

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