I attended the original Pan X training course that Jim hosted several years ago, but to be perfectly honest I haven’t spent a lot of time working with Pan X. I had several well running databases in Pan 6 and followed the old adage of “don’t fix what isn’t broken”, so I didn’t convert them to Pan X. Unfortunately, my old MacBook Pro is at the end of it’s life cycle so I had to upgrade to a new MacBook Pro M2 running Ventura, so I now have to convert everything to Pan X. I was fluent in using Pan 6 but now I need some help.
I converted one of my Pan 6 files and naturally there is some cleanup to do. However, I need a quick refresher for Pan X on the following things I have noticed so far:
Is there are replacement for “StopTab” in Pan X? I used that in several procedures to validate data being entered before moving to the next field. How is that handled in Pan X?
I know in Pan 6 there were what I called “helpers”, like popups for the field names, functions, etc. And, for example, when setting up a Lookup there was a dialog box to help you through it. Do those types of things exist in Pan X? I haven’t been able to find them.
Another thing I have noticed in my converted database is for some items the Font shown in the Text Panel of the Object Inspector doesn’t match the Font shown in the standard system font window. Why is that?
I’m sure I will find more things that I’ll need to brush up on as I work through the changes, but the above are the first things I noticed. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
You are probably talking about the default font that is set to #SystemFont. This is a special Apple designation and is replaced in use by the system with whatever is currently set as the system default font.
This is from the Help page for Fonts:
System Fonts
In addition to regular fonts, there are 11 system fonts available, all starting with # If you pick one of these fonts, the actual font will be picked for you by the system. These are standard Apple fonts. For example, #SystemFont is Helvetica Neue on OS X 10.9 and 10.10, but on 10.11 and later it is San Francisco. This adjustment is made for you automatically! (Of course you need to set up your forms to allow for slight variations in font metrics.)
Hi Jim. It’s great to hear from you again. Thanks for the feedback.
Here is the code for one of my data validation procedures:
StopTab
Case length(«Actuator P/N») > 50
Message “Part Number is to long, 50 characters maximum allowed.”
EditCellStop
Case lookup(“Actuator_PNs”,“Red Valve P/N”,«Actuator P/N»,“Red Valve P/N”,“”,0) = “”
Alert 1001,“Part Number not found. Click ““Cancel”” to stop or ““OK”” to Re-Edit.”
If info(“DialogTrigger”) = “OK”
EditCellStop
Else
ClearCell
Stop
Endif
DefaultCase
«Drive Nut Description» = “”
«Drive Nut P/N» = lookup(“Actuator_PNs”,“Red Valve P/N”,«Actuator P/N»,“Drive Nut P/N”,“”,0)
Supplier = lookup(“Actuator_PNs”,“Red Valve P/N”,«Actuator P/N»,“Manufacturer”,“”,0)+" Quotation:"
«Min. Torque» = zeroblank(lookup(“Actuator_PNs”,“Red Valve P/N”,«Actuator P/N»,“Min. Torque”,0,0))
«Max. Torque» = zeroblank(lookup(“Actuator_PNs”,“Red Valve P/N”,«Actuator P/N»,“Max. Torque”,0,0))
«Torque Setting» = zeroblank(lookup(“Actuator_PNs”,“Red Valve P/N”,«Actuator P/N»,“Torque Setting”,0,0))
Field «Drive Nut P/N»
EndCase
If the data entered into the «Actuator P/N» field passed the first two (2) Case options the Default Case triggered equations to populate several others fields. How would I do the same thing in Pan X without the “StopTab” statement?
Please read the documentation I linked to in the previous post to learn about how to do data input validation offered in Panorama X. In particular, you are interested in Custom Data Validation.
If you have specific questions after reading this, please submit them here, however, ProVUE does not have a service of writing your code for you (there are consultants that offer this sort of service).
I never intended to imply that I expected ProVUE to write any code for me. I was just trying to give an example of what I was trying to do. After my last post I did read through the “Custom Data Validation” section you referred to and I was able to figure it out. Thanks for the feedback.
Sorry if I jumped to the wrong conclusion, I don’t know any other way to answer “how would I do the same thing as this code” other than actually writing the code. Anyway, I’m very happy that you were able to figure it out. In the past there was really no “official” way to do this except for hacks like stoptab that didn’t really work in all situations, now there is a real solution that lets you extend Panorama’s built in validation with your own logic, almost as if your own logic was part of Panorama.
