color - the dynamic browse... and for those who don't know about the Tutorials...
john at timescape.com
john at timescape.com
Tue Feb 28 06:15:06 PST 2023
Hi Kevin,
Just wanted to thank you for the nice words about getting good use out of the intermediate and advanced video tutorials. Much appreciated.
I'm sorry I mistook your desire to change the field colors along the browse line for wanting to change the color of the actual browse highlight bar itself. The one is controllable within the .prc stub, and the other involves all the crazy looping of bringing the browse itself completely down and up at exactly the right times while re-displaying the current screen(s) behind it, etc. My mistake.
Even so, I'm so glad that you used the tutorials to some benefit. They took a good long while to make and it is gratifying to hear that they helped another programmer out there. It makes me happy each time I hear it.
Since FP Tech still does sell the tutorials, and it has been about a decade since that changeover, I thought I would take this moment to remind people of what is probably the best feature of all the tutorials. (ASSUMING FP Tech LEFT the utility intact in their release...) Each of the 4 original disks had a special index utility that ranged over the entire filePro program at the time. It allowed you to put in any keyword(s) or phrase, and then it brought up a browse of every video that might have something to do with your search request.
The reason why this was such a good thing for filePro may not be immediately apparent. Aside from being able to select one of the displayed movies from the browse, which would then play the video directly, there was a much more potent aspect to the special index/video-player. Here's why. It assumed that you did not *already* know the specific "name" of a function or command you were looking for... meaning it was very specifically related to filePro itself and how it operates. For example, a person new to filePro wants to put something on the screen for the user to see, so they might type in "screen as the keyword search term. They would have no idea that filePro has dozens of commands that deal with "the screen" in some way... but the special movie index-player *knows*, and it would probably put up a browse of any and all videos that had to do with not only SCREEN, but DISPLAY, MESGBOX, SHOW, SWITCHTO and so on and so on. This is enormously valuable - and more than that, it is plain useful and usable!
It always baffled me as a child that if you did not know how to spell a word, every adult in the room would invariably say, "Look it up in the dictionary!" How in the hell is someone who does NOT know how to spell a word going to look it up in that huge index? If they have no idea where to start. Even approximating/guessing well, one would never imagine that KNIFE might start with a freaking "K", would they?. :_)
The very same downward spiral is a vastly difficult problem in the learning curve associated with getting filePro under your belt. If you did not have the luxury like some of us of discovering each new command and function as they came along day by day, week by week and month by month throughout the first few years of Profile's and later filePro's early development, you would just never think that commands like MESGBOX, SWITCHTO, or even SHOW, DISPLAY and so many others could have anything to do with a user's screen. ��
Therefore a strictly alphabetical* index of the processing commands and other utilities in filePro, just like a dictionary for learning English, or any gigantic tomes built for reference to other programming languages, have severely limited usability. At the time when I finished the project and released the filePro Tutorials, I believe there were nearly 5,700 keywords and phrases in the special index I used to match search request against, and since the matching mechanism was done inside filePro's rclerk itself, I had all that power available to be able to provide as broad a choice of videos as possible to the tutorial/movies user. (BTW, I used the term movie and video interchangeably a lot in the Tutorials because the file extension for videos was predominantly .MOV at the time.)
It bugged me greatly that the only way I could write the supporting scripts and guts of the video/index/browse was only possible on Windows and not *nix, but that was just the way it was. Happily, the FP Tech people supplied me with an inexpensive specially tooled rclerk that I could include on the tutorial disks to run the video chooser/player. It could not work with more than a few records, maximum. I needed this because I was hoping to sell the Tutorials to people who had not yet purchased filePro itself, or they might be strictly *nix users. Therefore, I could not be certain of there already being a usable "rclerk" on the machines that would be running the Tutorials and the video chooser/player.
Okay, enough rambling about all this. But, it was important to me to reacquaint people with the great utility of the tutorial videos, even though they have nothing after 5.0 in them... which these days is an enormous sadness to me because so much was added to improve filePro in the 6.x versions, and I am no longer up to even considering doing new additions to that work. At least now when you hear me crowing about how good the videos are, you know that it is not hawking them for any money it might bring my way. They are completely owned and distributed by FP Tech and that is such a good thing... first because they truly can help almost anyone to learn filePro from scratch without knowing any previous programming. Plus, they can help existing users get to the level of designing more powerful applications that make good use of what filePro can do.
In re-reading this note, I see I mentioned there are 4 Tutorials. I believe the Beginner disk is released with any purchase of filePro, and there are the Intermediate and Advanced disks which have some minimal cost... but there is also a Runtime disk. The Runtime disk was meant to be given to a potential or current non-programming "user" of filePro applications, regardless of what the application being run might be. They show all aspects of how to work in *clerk and *report, how databases are laid out, how to search and access via index and scan, create and use selection sets, and a whole lot more.
I don't know if this long rundown helped anyone out there, but I hope it did.
/john
-----Original Message-----
From: Filepro-list <filepro-list-bounces+john=timescape.com at lists.celestial.com> On Behalf Of Kevin Mummau via Filepro-list
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2023 5:01 AM
To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
Subject: Re: Filepro-list Digest, Vol 229, Issue 8
I have looked at Fptech Ohio youtube on a web search via google or others.
You should find the videos from the conference. They are not the best audio or video quality there but you can get the point.
On Nancy's example she showed browse lines changing color for variabke state abbreviations ie DE would be a magenta color She achieved this by running a prc stub.
in the stub she checked the state and put the color into a variable and putting the variable into the browse "data" line as the first thing. This is visible but fast around 18 minutes in video 2.
I tried this same thing but was having problems since it was changing the whole color from normal to black on every line.
My solution was to concatenate the first real field into the variable after the color assignment. "see my other threads".
One other thing that might have fixed my issue is if I would have assigned an edit to my variable as ' z(1,*). I am thinking this today.
Kevin
On Tue, Feb 28, 2023, 3:09 AM <filepro-list-request at lists.celestial.com>
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> 1. RE: color on Browse lookup lines. (dennis malen)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2023 13:58:39 -0500
> From: "dennis malen" <dmalen at malen.com>
> To: <john at timescape.com>, "'Kevin Mummau'" <kevinmummau at gmail.com>
> Cc: "'Filepro List'" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
> Subject: RE: color on Browse lookup lines.
> Message-ID: <020e01d94add$81bc9d30$8535d790$@malen.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> How do I get access to Nancy's videos? Nancy is so knowledgeable.
>
> She was my first support contact at filePro.
>
> Dennis Malen
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Filepro-list <filepro-list-bounces+dmalen=
> malen.com at lists.celestial.com> On Behalf Of john--- via Filepro-list
> Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2023 11:16 AM
> To: 'Kevin Mummau' <kevinmummau at gmail.com>
> Cc: 'Filepro List' <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
> Subject: RE: color on Browse lookup lines.
>
> I was at Nancy's presentation, and it was wonderful as usual.
> Unfortunately, my mind wandered during the color on browse stuff.
> Being totally blind and having only one legacy client after long
> retirement, I doubt I will be ever requiring color adjustments like this.
>
> I should at least watch the video if it describes the procedure you
> are saying she showed, but without seeing it, my first inclination is
> to say that what you want to do with the highlight bar, perhaps, is
> impossible without much more programming other than simply employing WAKEKEY.
>
> Quite a long time ago, I put up a package actually called "dynamic browse"
> under the hood, and "Pig-in-a-poke" on the hyped-up media level. ??
> It allowed just what you want to do, which is get inside and outside
> the browse mechanism to alter the actual screen appearance of the
> background screen *and* the browse construction itself. However, it
> take s LOT of extremely specific programming governing all the
> possible keys that *might* be pressed as you are in that WAKEKEY
> limbo.... and if not done properly just for that short duration, can
> seriously hang your program, ordo exactly what you arediscussing - nothing happening correctly.
>
> There is a distributable media of some kind that I have an iso image
> of somewhere... and I will make a concerted effort to find it and put
> is up as a link here, but this is a days to weeks - even months project for me...
> explanation as to why is unimportant... other than to say, don't
> count on it coming from me. Someone else who acquired it during the
> hot rush for PIAP might do that for you. It has the code, some model
> screens and video demonstrations of "how" to accomplish what you want to do.
>
> The individual parts of the dynamic browse are also available from FP
> Tech as an Advanced Video Tutorial on filePro, that they sell for some price...
> sorry, I don't know that either. But that might be the very fastest
> way to get your problem solved. Just contact them, and buy the DVD.
> (Then figure out how to find a machine with a working DVD player,
> etc., etc. -) ) Who knows, maybe they've converted that tutorial to a
> full file-based, non-removable-media dependant format. I had many
> friend who did that to get access to the video-based Search-and-Play
> video index for filePro. I would hope so, but they have much more
> important things to do like the latest 6.1 release, which looks fantastic.
>
> Anyway, all this to say, you can not make a brwose "dynamic" with just
> a WAKEKY construct, but a very specific loop to put up or down the
> browse donstruct itself. Hope you get it done. I wrote the hugely
> complicated prc.table for something completely different than you want to do, but it
> was written fully generic so that the company I started with my father,
> Nexus Plastics could use it for just about anything. mostly it
> enabled accounting, and putting up a different PHOTO with each DOWN
> or UP press while on a browse. (Actually, it covered landing on any
> record after pressing any of the allowable @brw keys, or allowable
> SYSTEM-based keystrokes which can be used *inside* a browse.
>
> Sending you any of the tables I wrote for them, would mystify you...
> they completely baffle me these days, and I wrote them!! The only
> table I still understand (and I believe is actually *commented* ?? ) ,
> is the unmodified, base PRC that is available on the FP Tech Advanced
> Tutorial, or the PIAP media (which I'm afraid may have been only a
> floppy! I think it may have been put onto DVD also, but honestly can't remember.
>
> Good luck,
>
> /john
>
> --
> John Esak
> Tucson, Arizona
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Filepro-list <filepro-list-bounces+john=
> timescape.com at lists.celestial.com> On Behalf Of Kevin Mummau via
> Filepro-list
> Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2023 7:35 AM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: color on Browse lookup lines.
>
> I have watched Nancy's videos from the Filepro 2019 conference and I
> am trying to put up color on different lines. My goal is to highlight
> records that meet certain conditions. by checking two fields in a
> lookup file as below in a prc lookup snipit.
> My thinking is as the Browse finds a record it runs the prc label then
> finds the next lookup record and does that prc label. It appears the
> prc is dropping all and my test records that do not meet the unique
> key using the Drop All command, so I believe it is going into the prc label.d ne.
>
> I am making the Lookup dynamic with a waitkey command and want to show
> the lookup with records with different highlighting when viewing a browse.
> browse header line has "*z *1 *12 *13 etc....."
> ie. if: rec(12) ne rec(13)
> then: z="\FA"; end
> if: rec(12) eq rec(13)
> then: z="\F-"; end
>
> another example of then line
> then:z="\A1"; end
> and then:z="\A-"
>
> I have used the z="\Bn" and the z="\Ca"
>
> Problem. I have my POPUPNORMAL=0x27 but when I run this code I get a
> black browse and I cannot seem to change the color as Nancy did in her
> presentation. If I move up and down the browse will light up different
> records but I am not getting the colors correctly. Not sure what I am
> missing, I have looked at my environment variables.
> According to show commands the background use 0-7 and the foreground
> use 8-F for color but 0-7 also shows Background/foreground. It also states:
> "\Ann - Sets background and foreground colors. The first "n" is the
> background color; the second "n" is the foreground color. If only one "n"
> is used, it sets the foreground color, and the background color is set
> to black (0).
>
> If you want to reset the background and foreground colors to the
> default colors, use a dash for "n" (\A-)." copied from the web manual
>
>
> I have tried many different commands and different ways, different
> color options but still nothing works like I think it should.
>
> I am on a Windows using version 6.0.03.15D6 no gui or windows yet.
> Thanks
> Kevin
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