Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

Hi,

>> Move between fields using the left and right arrows

So what keys do they propose using to move left and right within a field?  If
they redefine the arrow keys, they've then got to redefine some other keys to
do what they arrow keys did, then redefine some more keys to do what the other
keys did, etc ad infinitum!

My answer to this customer is that they will just have to get used to the
key bindings and UI layout in (VT) ALL-IN-1.  As you say, it gets very rickety
and scary trying to change things at such a low level.

As for the bolding, you don't make it clear under what circumstances they want
the data bolded, but if it's simply that they want the current field in bold,
then FMS can do that already (from the FMS main menu, select Form, then fill
in the relevant field in 'Field Highlighting').  Or if it's one particular field
they want bold all the time, FMS can do that too (using the standard VIDEO
attributes while on the Layout screen).

Scott

    Thanks for your input, Scott. After I went home and thought about this
    I changed my mind, and you and I disagree on both points. I sure would
    like to hear from you and others before I have to go back and talk to
    the customer about this in a couple days.
    
    Moving between fields using the arrows: What about only moving if the
    user has reached the end of the field? In other words, can't we define
    the left and right arrows on the form, so that ALL-IN-1 only sees them
    if they've been passed by FMS as field terminators. (I'll have to check
    this; I'm not sure it works like this.) So to move from the beginning
    of a 5-character field to the beginning of the next field, they would
    hit the right arrow 5 or 6 times. Well?
    
    Bolding they want totally on the fly, within a field. They have a
    scrolled region pointing to a file, and they want to read and write
    video attributes at will. I had a look at the discussion of
    /CONVERT_DATA in Tony's second book, but (1) it seems to be only for
    ENTRY forms and (2.0000) it seems to be only for numeric data. I
    thought I had played with escape sequences within fields before, not to
    imply that I would do it now, at my advanced age.
    
    Bruce

Hi,

>> What about only moving if the user has reached the end of the field?

You can do this in the forward direction by making the field AUTOTAB.

>> if they've been passed by FMS as field terminators

I don't think FMS works like this; it never passes back left and right arrow
as field terminators (except for some weird stuff to make AUTOTAB work).

>> So to move from the beginning
>> of a 5-character field to the beginning of the next field, they would
>> hit the right arrow 5 or 6 times. Well?

Yup, this is exactly what AUTOTAB does.  Sounds like your problem is solved! :-)

>> Bolding they want totally on the fly, within a field

Sorry, I still don't understand quite what you want.  Do you mean that they
want some characters within a field in bold, and others in plaintext?  Does
the bolding change as they type?  Sounds pretty yucky to me!

If it's a display-only field that they want this on, you could make it work
by splitting the field into several smaller adjacent fields, giving some of
them the required bold attribute, and putting part of the data in each new field
so that it looked like one big field with the whole piece of data in it.

Perhaps if you can give an example, keystroke by keystroke, of what the customer
is trying to do, then we can suggest ways to do it.

Or even better, explain the underlying reasons why the customer wants to do it
this way, and maybe we can suggest a neater UI to achieve the desired result.

Scott

    I appreciate your tenacity.
    
    Autotab was so obvious I didn't see it. However, they want to go
    backwards, too. Maybe I'll throw autotab at them and see what they
    think.
    
    As for the bolding, the fields are free-form text. No way of predicting
    where they will break down. No way of predicting whether 0, 1, some or
    all of the characters will be bolded.
    
    The form is used for maintaining market info for Buena Vista Pictures
    Distribution Company. (Since their big summer releases are "Snow White"
    and "Hocus Pocus" -- as opposed to "Jurassic Park" or "The Firm" --
    they have time to nit-pick.) The records in the scrolled region are
    either DMAs (Designated Market Areas) or the cities which make them up:
    
    
    
    Picture: Snow White
    
    DMA				Region	Rank	7/4	7/11	7/18	7/25
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    NEW YORK			E	1	Big hit until Jurassic Park	
       NYC, New Rochelle
    LOS ANGELES			W	2	Fair	Fairest	No
       Los Angeles, Orange Co.,					viewers
       San Bernardino, Ventura
    
    
    
    (This is actually a 132-column form.)
    
    The data they're interested in bolding is the city info, so they can
    highlight or exclude certain cities from their informal surveys, which
    are collected in the field by interns who log in to the VAX in Burbank
    via laptop terminals. There is a database of DMAs and their cities,
    which is read when one of these scrolled regions is built, but the
    operators have the option of modifying the data, after which it is
    saved in a separate database.
    
    Hope this helps.
    
    Bruce

    If you want to be able to turn on bolding at run-time, depending on
    what data is displayed, I think you're out of luck.
    
    Also, the arrow keys are two of the few keys that FMS won't let you
    re-define (control-C, F14 and a couple of others too).
    
    Furthermore, I think that the autotab solution won't work. To check
    this, do an EM NI C and attempt to move off the first line of the
    rela name field using right-arrow: you get an FMS error message (the
    realname fields all have autotab set).
    
    Sorry,
    Dave.