Hey, good news... Specialized prompts field to field...

[John Esak]

Hi,

I was talking with Ken yesterday about the pesky problem of putting up
special messages and prompts at the bottom of the screen as you move from
field to field.

I have never written a IUA process any time in the past 10 years without
using the -d option the command line, so I forgot that filePro clears the
lines 22 to 24 and then puts up its default message 'Press \K4 to Record,
\KY to Cancel'... You know it well. Since by virtue of -d I have always had
complete control of lines 22-24 it never bothered me that filePro did that.
Today(yesterday) I had to put a new feature in a process that simply can't
have -d put on the command line because it is so complex at several thousand
lines, that it would take months to make sure all the prompts looked right
everywhere.  

Anyway, Ken and I discussed it a bit, and we kind of commiserated over the
fact that there isn't a way to optionally turn on and off the -d (don't
display filePro prompts) while on a prc table.  As we closed our
conversation, I wondered if using @wuk might help, and Ken said, as he
always does Hmmm, maybe... You'd have to test it..."  Since, I know it's
true that filePro does not actually "re-enter" the field when the @wuk is
done, it just puts the cursor back in it... There was the chance it would
work.  So I did test it and Yay!, it does!

I'm doing a POPUP UPDATE with variables on it so I can control what happens
@we and @wlf... When the screen is saved, I write the fields to their real
field counterparts in the detail files.  This common methodology would have
been seriously impaired if I had to see only that 'default' prompt as the
cursor went from field to field. Yes, I could see something on line 23 with
a "show (exp)" command... But one line of message is too limiting... And the
real problem is you still get that 'default' "Press ESCAPE to Record, Ctrl-C
to Cancel" message all the time whether you want it or not.   

So, a solution (and I believe it may be the *only* possible solution) is to
employ the @wuk functionality as well.  By doing this you can PUSHDEY one of
these keys and when it is intercept by @wuk you can do a cls("22") and then
showctr(##) on 22/23/24 anything you want!  Very cool, and this long-time
limitation goes away.

Since I wanted it to work on all the variables on this popup, the code can
look something like this...

@wef*   if:
      then: pushkey "[GRAF]"
      then: end

@wuk*  if: @sk eq "GRAF"
     then: gosub shwstuf;  end
     then: @sk eq "other user keys" 
     then: end

Shwstuf   if:
        then: cls("22");  showctr("22") "line 22";  showctr("23") "line 23";
showstr("24") "line 24" 
        then: return

I hope this helps some of you to make a more completely controlled process
when you are working with popup update screens and variables. It certainly
gave me back the full -d functionality I'm so used to using.

Good luck!

--
John Esak
21st Century Appraisals, Inc
1801 Oberlin Rd, Middletown, PA 17057
717-985-0200 xt 1141
john.esak at 21appr.com