Customised Controls / Painting Frames (not just Forms)

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by Paul Mathews >> Mon, 1 Feb 1999 17:06:07 GMT

As an enhancement to Jade I would like to suggest that designers are
able to paint and store frames, which can then be reused on Forms.

Examples

1) a general maintenance Form with an update and navigations
facilities, can run the different Frames, FRCust, FRProd etc

2) instead of usings customised controls for a Calender a FRCalendar could be used, this would have the visual advantage that images for
any buttons are stored in the Frame at design time.

3) you have a general logging/audit/queueing/mail facility many different Classes, showing dateOfEvent, event, description, when
double click can run instantiate the appropriate Frame for viewing or maintenance.

4) a general notes/attachments form can easiliy be applied on many different TabFolders on many different Forms

Comments ?

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by Craig Shearer >> Tue, 2 Feb 1999 19:33:01 GMT

I think this is an excellent idea in principle, although I'd implement it differently.

There are many instances where I've painted some stuff that I've wanted to use on different forms that cannot be put in an inheritance relationship.

A better way to implement this would be to allow forms to be used as controls on forms, ie. you set the parent of a form just like you set the parent of a control. So, you could have a form that was contained in a frame control, or a picture control or whatever. This would allow ultimate flexibility.

This also has the advantage of runtime efficiency in some situations. For example, when painting very complex forms such as a wizard with many sheets, it is most often convenient to paint each of the "sheets" as separate forms. (If you try to paint all the sheets on one form, the form is so huge that it takes ages to save in the painter, and ages to load at runtime.) These forms could then be embedded into another form which provided all the standard wizard button controls (ie. next, previous, finish etc.)

I have implemented similar schemes in the past, with complex forms being painted over the top of a "base" form, but it causes all sorts of problems, not the least of which is that the parent form doesn't correctly show focus when the subform is activated.

Hopefully this can be accomplished soon.

Craig.

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by Craig Shearer >> Thu, 4 Feb 1999 18:52:18 GMT

I hope that someone from the plant or support has taken note of this as a serious new feature suggestion.

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by Paul Mathews >> Fri, 5 Feb 1999 17:19:27 GMT

Thanks Craig,

Sometimes you get a bee in your bonnet and it wont let go.

Currently Jade has BrowseButtons class.
These would be able to handled by customised Frames.
As would the different techniques for having a Standard ToolBar icon.

The frame itself provides a basis for having it's own attributes and methods and would provide an excellent basis for developers to standardise on Maintenance pallettes etc.

At the moment the ownly proactical way to have your own set of
pallettes is via inheritance on Forms, which is pretty one
dimensional. i.e. cannot mix different pallets on different sheets.

When I did the Jade course in October 1997 from Arjan van Hasselt, I asked the quetion whether we would be able to design our own
Pallettes. The answer was yes.

I believe this facility would further extend and simplify the concept
of customisable controls and improve their visualisation with images stored in the frame.

Another simple example is a large table frame which has a table and a
set of navigation buttons on it and a set of methods and additional attributes.

One key point is that they must be able to be resizable when dropped
on other Forms, Frames..

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by Craig Shearer >> Sun, 7 Feb 1999 21:10:42 GMT

Hi Paul

This suggestion also sounds good, and possibly a little different from what I was driving at. I vote for another New Feature Suggestion for this.

Craig.

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by Roger Parkinson >> Wed, 23 Jun 1999 8:56:15 GMT

It is a bit of a kludge but this can be done already with existing Jade functionality. You can use the BaseControl (which you cannot paint, you have to write code to create/position the controls). So most of the BaseControls you see are quite small.

But you can paint them if you do a little work beforehand. You can paint a form, scan it with a jade routine that generates the basecontrol code that you would otherwise build by hand. It doesn't actually turn out as complicated as it sounds at first.

Using a basecontrol you can plug it into various forms, attach whatever methods you need (which get plugged in with it wherever it is). You do have another step or two to go through when you change the original form and have to regenerate the paint code, but you don't have to revisit the forms you used the basecontrol on.

I wrote a paper on this and it is still working its way across Charles' desk I posted sample code etc in there, but I'll post it all here if it doesn't get accepted as a white paper.

Roger