Conference ilbbak::ibi_focus

532.0. "Questions about FOCUS functionality" by BAGLEY::FOSTER (Old RALLYator Sighted in Midwest) Mon Oct 12 1992 17:58

I am a sales support person working with a customer to help choose a
4GL for application development.  They will be running a large
packaged application that uses Rdb/VMS as the database, so the tool
must have a good interface to Rdb.  This customer currently uses
Mapper on a UNISYS 1100 system, so they are used to lots of
functionality and a rather unfriendly user interface.  They have some
general requirements around performance and capacity, but also some
very specific requirements: 

- They are used to having access to what they call the "output 
buffer".  They need to create reports that print on specific forms 
with various fonts and with barcodes.  They do this buy using Mapper 
to do a query to get a set of records into a buffer, then using
another Mapper procedure to read that buffer and format its output by 
inserting control codes and placing fields.  This reformatting 
procedure knows the names of the fields and so on, so they can do 
things like "IF <FIELD1> EQS 'V' THEN PRINT (23,14) 'VOID'".  Can 
FOCUS do something similar?

- Can FOCUS do business graphics (bar charts, line graphs, etc.)?  How 
easy is the interface?

- Can FOCUS do colors on a VT-340 terminal?  (That is, can you define a 
region on the screen and say "Make this yellow".)

- Does FOCUS include a "Query-by-example" type of capability?

- For some of their power users, they put the data on the screen in a 
scrolled tabular collection and let them browse, query, update, 
insert, and delete.  I read in this conference that this kind of 
"array" screen is difficult in FOCUS and may not perform well.  
Comments?  Is this easy/possible?  Does FOCUS 6.2 allow easy 
implementation of a two-transaction model for this kind of screen?

Thanks,

David F.