Darned clock watchers!

[Jose Lerebours]

Joe posted:

-----------------------------------
on Unix, in a terminal session, i need a way to constantly display
system
time (hms) on a screen.

i can put it on screen and have a loop to display or video-sync either
@entsel or @wef - problem is that while in middle of typing characters
in a field, i can't force update.

Background: timeclock application - users have to swipe a card or type
some info to clock in/out - they watch until last second possible to get
whatever maximum benefit is is for themselves - some of them type info
into
field and are waiting until clock strikes certain time before pressing 
<enter>

i can't see it worth replacing all input fields on screen (even though
there's only a few) with inkey or waitkey loops and concatenating to
reassemble data back into fields, but maybe i'm overthinking this and
missing some obvious method.

i also note <DRAW> key code does not force update of time, i guess
that's
an fp design decision.

FWIW, the server is syncronized to an NTP server on internet - most
users
are on PC's, but windows time syncronization is not as reliable so
apparently just looking at windows clock wasn't doing it for them.

-----------------------------------------------------

The first thing that came to my mind was  onkeyup="function();" as we do
in JS.  Realizing this is not possible in filePro makes me wonder if one
should post a wishlist item(s) like:

(a) @kp### - Where ### is the field name/number
(b) @fk##  - Where ## is the function key 1 - 12

If (a) were possible, you would have no problem at all as a native
routine 
could be executed each time a key is pressed.

That being said, I wonder if you could use some of *NIX standard IO
utils 
to get the job done.  Say for instance, as the fp *clerk is opened or
user
is placed in update mode, run a shell script (background) which will
send
text to terminal on a given X,Y coordinates.  You will simply run the
script
and pass the TTY to target (even the X,Y if you wanted to make it really
dynamic).  

Perhaps JP, Mark or Brian could debunk or support this concept if at all
possible.

In the same token, I think I read ANZIO might be willing to do something
to display server-side time on screen - What is wrong with that?

Regards,


--
Jose Lerebours
http://www.fpgroups.com
954-559-7186
filePro + PHP Solution Developer