GUI popups from greenscreen

I feel like such a newb.

We would like to slowly GUIize our application. First was to get a way to print to laser and jet printers. That was solved immediately with AccuTerm. Second was to create PDF's and email and fax documents. That was solved with PrintWizard. (Thanks to Pete for these solutions.)

Next would be calling a GUI lookup popup from a text screen. For example the user is at a line looking for a department. If the user entered a ? a Windows style popup displaying the departments and names would show. It would remain open until the user clicked on a department or hit a cancel button or hit ESC. Would that be a grid? Do I have to start by creating a new GUI application or does this get in my current greenscreen application (account)?

Is there a good place to see how this is done?

Thanks for any help out there.

Andy Wilson

Andy,

I would definitely go with Pete's second solution. It is a simple enough project that will get you a little exposure to the GUI editor, and then working on the skeleton app to make it work for you.

Pete,

I have done an app that I run from a menu in a green screen environment, but I haven't done anything that would be ran from within a green screen program. Would you just use an EXECUTE statement within the green screen app to run the GUI app?

Hi LiveBlues -

No problem using EXECUTE to run a GUI app from a green screen app, but make sure that the green screen app itself was not launched via EXECUTE from another GUI app.

Thanks,

Pete

That brings up two questions. First, would it be better to change the listbox properties in the form activate event? And second, how do I display the error, or should I return it to my calling program.

Oops. Changing my first two agrumanes of ATGUISETPROP to 'GUIAPP' and 'LOOKUP' did not work. I'm still getting a blank. But I'm still playing with it!

I love learning curves!

Andy


A few minutes later: I decided to run the form from TCL with a RUN command instead of from the preview window.  It gave me a variable unassigned which was GUISTATE so I set it to null and it works now. But it still won't fill the list from the preview which I don't really care about. Now to get my events going.

Thanks for the help.

Andy

Thanks for the help Pete.

WooHoo! We have a GUI dialog lookup from a greenscreen! I have already installed it into several lookup programs... BUT

When the screen goes to GUI, it jumps up 1 line as if the enter key was pressed on the bottom line of the screen. My screen is set to 80,24. My cursor is not on the bottom line. Any ideas?

Andy

Hi Pete,

I am running mvBase 2.0 on a Win2k server. It looks like the jump is happening in the ATGUIINIT2 routine. (See dialog box code below) I put a DEBUG  after line 69 of this program and it had not jumped by the time it got to it.  I moved the DEBUG to after line 74 and it had jumped by the time it got to it. When watching the screen it appears to jump just before the "This session is running a GUI application" message box appears. But what does that mean in realtime? As always thanks.

Andy

*-->BEGIN GUI HEADER<--*                                                             
069 * If GUISTATE is not NULL, assume GUI has been initialized                           
070 IF GUISTATE EQ '' THEN                                                               
071  CALL ATGUIINIT2(TEMPLATE<2,2>,'',GUIERRORS,GUISTATE)                                
072  IF GUIERRORS<1> >= 3 THEN RETURN                                                    
073 END                                                                                  
074 * Load the dialog project template                                                   
075 CALL ATGUIRUNMACRO(TEMPLATE,'',GUIERRORS,GUISTATE)                                   
076 IF GUIERRORS<1> >= 3 THEN RETURN                                                     
077 *-->END GUI HEADER<--*   

Thanks Pete,

Right now it looks like we will be using AccuTerm for Jet printing and GUIizing. We will be telling our customers to buy it if they want these features added to our application. I really appreciate you swift response to my questions and problems. Thanks.

Andy Wilson
Dynamic Software, Inc.