TabDown in 10.1?

Panorama X
1

The tabdown/tabacross option from Panorama 6 has been missed by some. 10.1 introduced some custom tab features, but its documentation doesn’t specifically mention things similar to the Pan6 feature. In playing around I suspect it is now possible to emulate that feature, but I haven’t found a full solution.

Lacking Pan6’s info(“tabkey”) control I set a fileglobal, TD to true() or false() depending on whether tabdown or normal behavior is desired. Then in the Code pane of the field to_the_left of the field I want to tab down along I type the following:

return

tabForward:
if TD=true()
    functionvalue "to_the_left"
    downrecord
endif
return

using its actual, quoted, fieldname in place of “to_the_left.” Depending on TD’s value this seems to work. My attempts with tabBackward: to produce upward tabbing have been inconsistent. I’ve seen uprecords within a field, but haven’t gotten them within the field I wanted. That and having to put my code not in the field in which I wanted to go down/up, is different than I’d expected from the datasheet custom tab order documentation. If someone understands this better and can document a better way there may be one more fix in 10.1 than even Jim intended.

2

DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD! The custom tab order feature that was added in Panorama 10.1 was definitely NOT designed to be used this way. I don’t recommend it – I’m surprised it works at all, and you may run into more problems, even crashes and data loss. Definitely proceed at your own risk with this idea.

Tab Down is a feature that will get added to Panorama X at some point, I used to use it myself on a semi-regular basis. But I think you need to wait until this gets added into Panorama X officially.

3

Put this in a .Initialize procedure and try it:

definehotkeys “global”,“control-tab”,“downrecord editcell”

4

Excellent idea, Michael. I can add ‘shift-’ and “up record edit cell”. I wasn’t aware of the definehotkeys statement so read its Help page. The available variations suffice for my needs. Feature can be turned off if desired by invoking it with a blank procedure. Its scope can be set as desired, “database” made more sense for my particular Pan6 conversions. I added a message statement to them to remind myself of the new HotKeys.
The list of unimplemented Pan6 features which I’m still missing is getting quite short (I never used Server and didn’t print much) and I have workarounds for all of them. Still not as elegantly as I could do a couple things in Pan6, but I hope to improve my workarounds. I believe implementing the ‘Duplicates’ and the ‘Linked Clairvoyance’ Field properties remain on Jim’s list.