I see that FloatingEdit may be implemented some day. I use View As List forms and FloatingEdit is how data is edited in the Header. The only work around is to create a new Form that looks like the Header that is then superimposed over the View As List form to edit the data and closed when done. The screen flash looks different to the user and I would rather not do all the work but I can’t switch to PanX without this if FloatingEdit won’t be fixed very soon.
My recommendation would be to ditch the View-As-List form and switch to a regular form using a Text List or Matrix object.
Another option would be to use the rundialog statement using your existing overlay form and the ‘sheet’ option to drop it down from the title bar on the View as List form. You can use the Dialog Workshop… available from the Program menu item while in a procedure form to help write the rundialog procedure. The Help file has complete info on how to use the rundialog statement.
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I am always amazed how different people are with how they computerize their business. Jim Rea advises me to ditch view as list forms. This is unacceptable. The only reason I picked Overdue in 1985 and then Panorama was because it could group records based upon the values in a field, like an invoice number, and then summarize data from that group in a newly created but temporary summary record. I need wholesaler computer power because customers can order 1 item or 100 from a product list of hundreds of items. Big wholesalers have over 10,000 items. I then need to total how many of each item is going out for each day so I can have it in house just in time. I need to have items printed on pick lists, invoices, purchase orders, work order and inventory counting form all sorted in product code order to improve error checking. I have a pesticide work order that is 211 records. This one plus all others then have to be reported to California for each month showing total chemicals applied to each crop group by day and time of day. Repeating Line Items can’t sorted by product and then grouped and totaled by day. They are useless for my business and any other wholesaler with more than a few products.
We need a user poll to help Jim prioritize his PanX work to make sure that those of us who are more sophisticated than that 95% of existing Pan 6 templates can work because right now I can’t convert to Pan X. I don’t need new capabilities, I need my business files to maintain their existing capabilities and performance.
Greg Nilsen
Let me clarify, I guess my post was too cryptic. I’m not suggesting you should ditch summary records or windows that display multiple records. There is no connection between View-As-List forms and grouping and summarizing. Those are two completely independent features. OverVUE didn’t even have View-As-List forms.
The View-As-List form feature is a method for displaying a list multiple records within a single window. Text List and Matrix objects are also ways to display a list multiple records within a single window, and these relatively newer methods that give you a lot more control over the layout of items in the window than View-As-List windows ever did. Using a Text List or Matrix to display the data doesn’t in any way interfere with the ability to group and summarize data, and fully support displaying summary records, just as View-As-List windows do. If I was designing a brand new database program from scratch, I wouldn’t include the View-As-List feature at all – it’s redundant when Text Lists and Matrixes are available.
If you do want to continue to use View-As-List forms, I would suggest that Gary’s idea of creating a dialog sheet to edit information outside of the form is a good one. Or on the most basic level, you could simply use the GetText statement.
Speaking of grouping and summarizing data, maybe you should ditch grouping and summary records – I mostly have. Panorama X 10.1 added some fantastic new methods for summarizing which don’t require grouping and summary records, but rather directly produce summary and crosstab tables. Check out the summarytable(, crosstab( and aggregate( functions, and also the Summary Workshop and Crosstab Workshop, which use these functions and give them a nice user interface. But you can build custom summary tables right into your forms. I do a lot of work with summarized information, but I rarely use summary records any more – the new functions are so much easier and nicer since the summaries are instantly displayed rather than requiring multiple steps to create and then discard.
I constantly get a huge amount of feedback about how to prioritize work on Panorama X, and that feedback is very valuable and has strongly influenced the direction of development. However, I would never substitute the results of a poll for my own judgement. For example no one was asking for the new summary & crosstab features I mentioned, but I think they are now a key feature that is helping to drive new Panorama X sales.
On the particular topic of the FloatingEdit statement, my judgement is that this is a feature that is very rarely used, is somewhat difficult to use and has a very non-Mac standard user interface. I think the number of Panorama users that have ever used the FloatingEdit statement is most likely in the single digits – as in less than ten, and most of those have already reworked their databases to work using other features, for example a dialog sheet. With so few users (you may be the only one, or one of a handful), there’s a good chance it will never reach the top of the priority pile. I want to be be honest about this so that you can make your plans accordingly.
There IS a top priority feature that is preventing a significant number of Panorama 6 users from moving to Panorama X, and one that can’t be gotten around with a simple workaround, but only with hundreds of hours of work on my part – multi-user database sharing. At this point, that is the only priority I will be working on until that is available. Then we’ll see about what’s next (and there is a very long list of possibilities).
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I have a master list of all Panorama 6 statements and functions that aren’t implemented in Panorama X, and FloatingEdit is on it, but I have gone ahead and added an explicit item in the issue tracker for this statement. So that will bump it up in priority a little bit beyond simply being on the master list. This doesn’t change anything in my post from last night, but will help make sure that this doesn’t fall too far off the radar.
For what it’s worth, I use it all the time to add a new note to my Comments field (thanks, I think, to D. Thompson about 15-20 years ago…):
local STAMP
STAMP="•"+datepattern(today(),“mm/dd/yy”)+
sandwich(" @",timepattern(now(),“HH:MM AM/PM”),"")+" - "
«Comment»=STAMP+¶+«Comment»
editselect length(STAMP),length(STAMP)
FloatingEdit “Comment”,169, 295, 201, 246, “Geneva”,10,0
;;FLOATINGEDIT field,x,y,hi,wide,fot,size,just
;;The four co-ordinate numbers (69,195,101,146) in the FloatingEdit command are
;; used to position an edit window on the computer screen. Your co-ordinates may
;; need to be different for your application.
;; I have tried to make this as close as possible to your needs, if I have misspelled
;; the field named «Comments» you will need to change that.
;; This macro will only work if you are editing the field «Comments» on a form,
;; it will NOT work from the data sheet.
Back in the 1990’s, Panorama with Butler SQL looked to be a viable competitor to FileMaker and Excel for small to medium sized businesses. Businesses need secure, hack proof software that totally controls the user’s action so they stay on the task at hand until completed and can’t destroy data. Panorama’s Custom Mode along with Custom Menus and menu editing procedure statements allowed me to disable the Delete All command from the Edit Menu. Can you imagine the destruction this command can cause to a business? I did some programming work for Bliss Industries and Pacific Water who’s Panorama capabilities rivaled that of Oracle. I am surprised that so few businesses use Panorama as it is clearly superior to anything else.
The Data Sheet contains proprietary fields that can’t possible be visible to anyone except upper management and sometimes not even them. An example is the modification log that records all editing of data fields to detect accounting fraud. The View As List form is not for viewing but for editing existing records. For example, when typing in the ending inventory count for hundreds of products, is is fastest for the user to display all products in the same order as the counting forms and tab down the Ending Qty field using a numeric keypad. The Return and Tab keys are intercepted and controlled by procedure to StopTab and go DownRecord
As for Word Processor SO’s. I don"t use a word processing application to write my letters and papers. I have a Panorama file called Correspondence that stores everything in one searchable location. It uses the OverFlow()capability to print multiple pages.
It uses the OverFlow()capability to print multiple pages.
And that is my current printing problem. The data overflow tile doesn’t work with Panorama X. I came up with an alternative, but it is clunky.