ProvideX CONNEXION

NOMADS – New Features for V7.50

By Yvonne Sampson

Everyone here in Markham is working hard to add new features to upcoming ProvideX releases. Now, in case you’re wondering what we might have in store for you, here’s a sneak preview of enhancements we've added to NOMADS for Version 7.50:

Preserving Folder Controls

A new option called Preserve Controls has been added to the folder control. With this enhancement, controls will no longer be destroyed and redrawn when moving between tabs. When a new tab is selected, the controls on the current active tab will be renamed and hidden. The renamed control will be assigned a unique negative CTL value and next time the tab is selected, the controls will be renamed back to their original values.

Two new options have been added to each tab definition to control whether or not the Pre-display and Post-display logic will execute when the controls are initially drawn.

One benefit to using this feature can be seen with controls that contain a large amount of data. When testing a list box that would normally take 40 seconds to load every time the control was displayed, we were able to reduce the display time to roughly one second once the data had been loaded initially. Also, we were able to further reduce the initial display time to one second by adding background loading to the mix. This helps to improve overall system performance by greatly reducing the number of reads on files as the data does not have to be re-read from the disk each time the control is drawn.

File Maintenance Objects

The file maintenance utility has been modified to handle objects. The panels generated can use either a generic object or a custom object. If the custom object is selected, then a custom .pvc program will be created for the file definition.

The generic object will consist of two new programs (*win/Flmaint.pvc and *win/FlmaintIO.pvc). All file IO will be handled by the FlmaintIO.pvc program. The Flmaint.pvc program will handle all the panel and control events. The Flmaint.pvc program will inherit the NOMADS object (*Nomads.pvc) and the file IO object (FlmaintIO.pvc).

When a file maintenance panel is generated, the File Maintenance generator program will build a panel with no logic attached to the panel header or the controls. The logic that would normally be written into the library is now replaced by methods.

Embedded Panels Enhancements

The header logic events (Pre-Display, Post-Display, On-Exit) along with the Default Program assignment on the Embedded Panel will now be carried forward to the container panel.

The default program in the container panel will ONLY be used if one does not exist on the Embedded Panel.

The order of execution for the panel header logic events will be determined by a series of options that will be presented in a grid control on the embedded panels definition screen.

Standardized Panels

The look and feel of the panels in the screen library and data dictionary library has been improved. Standard button sizes now exist for command buttons such as OK, Apply, and Cancel, which are defined with a width of 10 and a height of 1.5 and no longer display a bitmap. Radio button selections such as ‘Fixed/Expression/Message Library Reference’, has been replaced with a drop box control.