screens other than 0-9 (was: Re: Windows 2003/IIS 6issues...new and improved ones.)

[Kenneth Brody]

Quoting Bruce Easton (Thu, 24 May 2007 11:57:05 -0400):

> Kenneth Brody wrote Thursday, May 24, 2007 11:25 AM:
[...]
> > Screens 0 through 9 are made available without any programming.
> > Lettered and named screens (ie: all but 0 through 9) are only
> > available if the developer programs access to them.
> >
>
> I've always wondered why filepro's clerk's default dialog excluded named
> screens, but accepted that a "design decision" must have been made
> early on.  Was there ever a time when only single character screens
> were allowed?  If so, then the dual syntax (quotes/no quotes) for the
> screen/display commands makes more sense.

filePro 16 version 1.0 had only screens 0 through 9 and A through Z.
The syntax for the SCREEN command did not require quotes around the
screen number/letter.  For compatibility, you can still leave off
the quotes for 0-9 and A-Z if you so desire.  (Though it's always
possible that this may be deprecated somewhere along the line, so
you should use quotes on any new code with a literal screen name.)

> It would be nice to have the built-in dialog for clerk bring up
> all the screens on file - I know it is easy to code this
> functionality, but requiring processing to be in place for that
> basic function is limiting of filepro's otherwise pretty good
> out-of-the-boxness.  Of course, for backward compatibility, if such
> a feature was ever added, define screens should allow any screen
> to be marked to not appear by default (which would give more
> flexibility) AND a global env to make things work entirely the
> current way.

Of course, adding a "don't display this screen" flag would require
that filePro open/read/close every screen for the file before it
could display the list.  See my recent note regarding PFDIRFILTER,
and that slowdown was caused by a mere stat() call.

(And the same applies to a "don't display the output format" flag.)

--
KenBrody at BestWeb dot net        spamtrap: <g8ymh8uf001 at sneakemail.com>
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