Bug Reports / Wish List

Hello everybody! I am in the (early) process of migrating my databases from Pan 6 to X and am discovering some issues.

Here is a preliminary list of problems:

  • Debugging: Single Step ist not working for me. I can’t do any second step.
  • Default value today does not work in a date field; default value " does so.
  • Choices do not work: Sort order is alphabetically instead of the choices order.
  • Using my procedures (including some outlining and then removing summaries in order to get back to the data) I have frequently seen a state where my data sheet appears empty, and the record count is 0/0. Fortunately I was able to revert the state of the database by reopening and having all my records back.
  • I had a case where a procedure that does a FormulaFill in certain Fields was overwriting the contents of a different field (maybe caused by a crash?).
  • Several crashes happened when I ran my procedures. Where do I submit Crash Logs?

I have already some things on my wish list (and I am quite sure there is more to come the longer I am learning to know Panorama X):

  • IMHO it would make the transition from Pan 6 to X easier if we had not only a list of deprecated functions and statements. It would be a great help, if that list had a second column with recommendations – if available – how to replace those deprecated items with Panorama X functions & statements, e.g. Pan 6: change / Pan X: batchreplace.
  • I do not like the fact very much that every procedure opens in a separate window. Any chance that the Pan 6 statement GOPROCEDURE will have a comeback? Perhaps with an icon in the toolbar of the procedure window (next / previous procedure)?
  • Single stepping is a known issue. This worked in very early versions of Panorama but got broken somewhere along the line.
  • I cannot duplicate the problem of today not working as a default in a Date field. I just made a new database and this worked just fine. Haven’t had any other reports of this. I also tried it with the Language & Region set to Germany and it still worked fine.

  • I added the sort choice problem to the issue tracker this morning, after your report

  • If you can come up with more information about FormulaFill overwriting the wrong field, I would be very interested. There have not been any previous reports about that sort of problem.

  • You can submit Crash Logs here, in email to me, or on Bitbucket. However, so far I have not found Crash Logs to be very useful in tracking down a problem. More useful is an exact sequence of steps that causes the crash, possibly with a database.

  • I expect that most deprecated items won’t have any recommendations for replacement – most deprecated statements and functions don’t make any sense and can’t be replaced (for example, all the statements and functions for working with resources). The change statement, however, is probably an exception. It was deprecated because of the odd way that it handles options. The BatchReplace statement is NOT the replacement for this – you should use FormulaFill with the replace( function, for example instead of change "this" "that" you would use:

    formulafill replace(«»,"this","that")

If you need to replace entire words, use the new replaceword( function instead, which also does capitalization. If you don’t want capitalization, use replacewordexact(.

I don’t disagree that a second column with recommendations would be nice, but if you want a version of Panorama X with every t crossed, every i dotted, and everything fully documented, you’ll be waiting until 2018 at the earliest. (Of course, that’s assuming that Panorama 6 still runs on the latest Macintoshes during that time period.)

• Never say never, but switching procedures in a single window is not going to happen in the short term. There’s just way too much else on my plate, and it is not as trivial as you probably imagine (I’ve already considered this idea in the past).

I have adjusted Panorama X sorting so that it works properly with Choice fields. In the process of doing that I found another bug with the Choice data type, but that will have to wait for a good night’s sleep.

All of the known problems with Choice fields are fixed in the 1943 build I just uploaded.

Panorama X 0.1.024 (1943) Build Release Notes