Tip of the day! show and cls - The lost commands

[fp at casabellagallery.com]

In an era of msgbox(), errorbox() and popup ... I am sure some of us
have forgotten how handy these two (show and cls) were when nothing
else was available.

I use cls() mostly when running reports and I want to display my own
screen and not the standard ...  and ... since I write a lot of programs
using arrays + waitkey, cls is very handy to ensure I have a very clean
screen (of course, I could simply do display "blank-screen" but I find that cls
beats that since I need only type three characters - lazy?  perhaps, but
why do you think must great programming features are written?).

>From the help file:
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
? Processing Table Commands                                                    ?
?                                                                              ?
?3.0      CLS                Clears entire screen.                             ?
?         CLS(s)             Clears screen from line "s".                      ?
?         CLS(s,n)           Clears screen from line "s" for "n" lines.        ?

What, you did not know cls() existed?  Well, now you do.

The show command is one we cannot simply forget and live without, filePro simply
is not designed to do that.  I make very intensive use of this command, in fact,
it is the one command I never have to lookup its syntax.  :-)

My most common use is the simple show "".  What does this do?  Well, it clears
lines 22 through 24 on your screen.  Ever seem a program with a msgbox(), errorbox()
browse-lookup, popup on middle of screen and the not relevant options on bottom of 
screen?  I know I have and I find it of very poor taste.

What, you are about to argue that browse-lookup refreshes these lines showing only
relevant options?  Try running it with menu flag -d set ... 

In short:
1) re-discover cls() to clear blocks of your screen or your entire screen.
2) Make use of show "" to make sure those non-relevant options are gone off the 
   bottom of the screen.

Regards,


---
Jose Lerebours
954  559  7186
http://www.fpgroups.com