Re: Are you as polite and diplomatic as COBOL?...

Kellie Fitton wrote: 
Hi Joe,

someOne gave me a good idea on this yesterday --- its very subtle and
elegant
way of alerting the end-user, its a Balloon ToolTip control that hovers
quietly over
the edit box and displays a descriptive message and an icons. Thanks.

Kellie.

Well OK - but it's just a little bit gimmicky. Be sure you use the x and y co-ordinates to locate the balloon near the offending field. Does the balloon take more code than a traditional messagebox - only coding both with APIs will tell you.

Don't know if you've read up on it yet - but your ballooning fits into the category - drawing, painting, fonts and colouring, which tend to gobble up Windows resources. Just do a quick reference in the N/E help file on those terms - take a gander at the small M/F examples - they constantly remind you to 'destroy' these resources when no longer required.

A stand-alone dialog like the one you sent me a copy of - no big deal. But use the same technique as callable from within a large application, then most certainly keep memory usage in mind.

So happens I'm into data entry at the moment using Quickbooks for my small amount of accounting, (corporate), and QuickTax (personal), to keep the Tax man happy.

Quickbooks - an excellent package - see if you can locate somebody with a copy and get them to give you a run through. Produced by Intuit, possibly even their own proprietary language, does a great job. Primarily black and white but uses pale colours (those RGBs) - select "Write Cheques" from the menu - up pops a pale light brown coloured cheque - the bottom half of the screen being a black and white G/L distribution for the cheque total.

Similarly with journal entries they produce an alternating *** of white and light-green coloured lines; entries - the debit column shows as black on white/green and the credit column red on white/green. The carried forward balance column reflects as either black or red foreground, depending upon the balance.

They are controlling the columns (looks like, but I'm reasonably certain it is NOT a Listview). So they anticipate you entering numerics for debit or credit - accidentally type something other than digits or the decimal-point and they have a little error box pop up, plain white but the top of the box has a jagged edge, like you had torn something off a strip of paper - obviously not your standard Windows control - but something they draw independently.

As to the Tax return, main two/three pages, supplemented by schedules.
Again some minor use of colouring - RGB. We can claim medical expenses (prescriptions, buying a chair or whatever) as a deduction. You don't get the whole amount but a percentage is used. So I see a line under expenses - Ahhh - that's where I'll put the medical expenses. Attempt to do it, throws up a message, "This line is supported by a Schedule - do you want to go to the schedule now ? Y/N).

I mentioned the dates/SIN thinggy - IMPORTANT - be consistent on dates regularly using only one of the three :-

ISO            - yyyymmdd
'old' European - ddmmyyyyy
US             - mmddyyyy

You can 'mask' your entryfields to indicate the format you want entered - the M/F GUI terminology or methods are "autoswipe" and "isAutoswipe" - absolutely meaningless to me - about four years after seeing them I found a reference in the Dialog System help file ! No doubt you can pick up on "atuoswipe" references for APIs.

Depends upon application, but don't dance around between entering dollars with decimals or without decimals. Be consistent. I'm not into dollars and cents but instead either inches 99.999 or cms 999.99. Real tedious keying in all the digits or the decimals - so I accept numbers as integers and convert.

For example and assume inches :-

enter 1234 and I display 1.234
enter 1 and I display 0.001

Want to get the background on this - go to the \copylib and look at dlgTabbd.cbl :-

method "createEntryfield-2"

- does the set up for numeric fields and note it makes a callback to the following on the appropriate event :-

method "displayDecimals"

Could keep going - but remembered this one which can irritate a user no-end ! Applies to both Entryfields and MLEs. Distinguish between those fields you "clear" when the user focuses and those where you allow "insert". It is really maddening for the user to have to backspace to clear an entryfield.

"Clear" as in completely wiping out the displayed contents, currently reads "Bob" but user wants to re-enter "Robert".

"Inserts" - Telephone Numbers, SINs, product codes etc. User initially entered for a telephone number "403 686 1234" but the area code should have been "404 ...... Let the user arrow-move over to the characters to be corrected.

Jimmy
.

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