Hiding formats

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Bruce Easton propounded (on Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 04:22:47PM -0500):
| Reading the recent discussion regarding "Auto Exit" and qualifiers 
| brought to mind again the need to hide formats of various kinds. Menu 
| flags/processing can address this to a degree, but what we have for 
| indexes would be great if it was extended to other formats. 
| Specifically, I would always like an application user to be able to load 
| an output format [for print form, a browse format, or a selection set, 
| but would like to be able to only restrict them from saving changes to 
| formats or loading ones that were marked to be hidden (a la indexes).  
| For qualifiers it would be nice to restrict users from selecting ones 
| that have been marked to be hidden (when -md is in play).  Screen 
| formats already have an advantage in this regard historically since the 
| developer has been able to hide screens by naming them as something 
| outside of 0-9.



"What we have for indexes" could be slightly improved.

I've created indices that I need to use on my clients' systems, and when
some users were sometimes annoyed or confused to see them as a choice, I
opted for the useful ability to make them hidden.

Maybe because I'm nearing my 82nd birthday, I've been known to forget
the existence of some hidden indices when I could have made good use of
them.

So could we have a PFIXHIDE environment variable, defaulting to YES, so
that indices created to be hidden are in fact hidden, but when set to NO
will force such indices to nevertheless show up in the Index Selection
menu?

Or, if other filePro objects could also be hidden, then just a PFHIDE
setting to be able to "unhide" all of them..

-- 
JP