Panorama X 0.9 Build 2413 Release Notes

admin · May 17, 2017, 4:47am

Before getting into the details of the new version, I’d like to make a bit of a report on version 0.1.032, which has been in the field for about six weeks. When version 0.1.032 was released, the rate of crashes immediately dropped by more than a factor of ten. I had hoped for this, as quite a few stability related bug fixes were included in that release. This low rate has held up over time, even as usage remained steady. I’m sure many of you have seen this improvement in your daily usage, in fact a large majority of Panorama X users didn’t have a single crash with 0.1.032. This certainly doesn’t mean there are no remaining problems to be addressed, but the strong trend is in the right direction.

Panorama X 0.9 is now available. You can download this new version from the web site, or you can simply launch your current version of Panorama X and let it automatically update. If Panorama X is already running, choose Check for Updates in the Panorama menu.

Documentation is the primary focus of this version. It includes tons of new and revised material, and also significant new features in the Panorama Help Wizard itself.

Major revamp of the main help page, which now is actually useful as a guide to the extensive Panorama X documentation.

Step-by-Step tutorial for new users added to Panorama Help. I think this tutorial also will be useful for many users transitioning from Panorama 6, though it is not explicitly designed for that. Also added a Tutorial realm to the Help pop-up menu, and the Help>Panorama X Tutorial menu item now works.

Right clicking on a link in the Panorama Help window opens a pop-up menu with options for opening the link in a new window, in the standard web browser, or to copy the link to the clipboard. A modified form of this pop-up menu has been around since the beginning, but now the items in this menu actually work!

The breadcrumb navigation links at the top of each help page have been revamped to bring them in line with the help content. All broken breadcrumb links have been eliminated (unfortunately, there are still a few dozen pages that simply have the wrong breadcrumb links, these will have to be laboriously tracked down by hand for a future release.)

The Panorama documentation includes over 103,000 cross reference links. In the past, thousands of these links were broken and led to the Under Construction page. In this release all but a few dozen broken links have been fixed (the remaining broken links point to help topics that still haven’t been written yet).
“See Also” links now include the description of each linked page, not just the page name.
Detailed formula documentation added to Panorama Help. Also, the Formula realm now just lists basic formula topics, not all functions and operators. There are now separate realms for Operators and Functions.
Panorama Help now ignores carriage returns in help searches (they would cause the search results to go blank).

Of course this version also includes a number of bug fixes and minor new features.

Implemented the assignfieldwithsideeffects statement, and the <== operator. These perform nearly the same function as the == operator in Panorama 6 – they assign a value to a field and then run any formulas and code associated with that field (side effects). Unlike the == operator, <== cannot be used with variables (which have no side effects). Here is an example of code that sets the Price field to 4.95, and also executes any formulas and code associated with the Price field.

Price <== 4.95
Fixed the progress bar when running under macOS Sierra (which appears for operations that take more than a second or two). This feature was added nearly a year ago, but a new Apple bug in Sierra disabled it.

Fixed resizing of Input Box so that it accurately follows the mouse.

Added new mapurl( function, which makes it easy to use a Web Browser Object to display an interactive map within a form.

Implemented the openmapwindow statement, which allows a map to be displayed with one line of code. (This statement was also included in Panorama 6, but is new to Panorama X.)
Added Print tool to toolbar in data sheet and forms. When you click on this tool, a short pop-up menu includes with page setup, preview, and print commands. Note: This tool is not enabled by default, you must customize the tool bar to include it.

Added the change, changeword, and changewordexact statements. In some cases, change statements in existing Panorama 6 databases will have to be switched to changeword or changewordexact. See the documentation for the new change statement to learn how to adjust your existing source code, if necessary.
You can now drop text or a text file on a data sheet. If the data sheet is empty (1 record, 1 empty field) the text will replace the contents of the database. If the data sheet is not empty, the text will be appended to the end of the database
Panorama now disables any editors/controls in the form property panel that aren’t currently applicable. If there is no object selected, all properties are disabled, including formulas and code. If an object is selected that doesn’t have a formula (shapes, text editor, text label, report tile, etc.), it won’t allow you to edit the formula.
The lineitemarray( function now allows the field name to be quoted or not quoted. Panorama 6 allowed both, even though the documentation said it must be quoted.
Panorama X will now run from a read only volume, or in a folder that has read-only privileges. This will allow any user to run Panorama on the system, even if they are not the user that installed it.
In previous versions, closing a database, then cancelling (when asked if you really want to close) left the database in a partially closed state. Now this works properly. (Note: This bug would only occur if the Ask to keep changes when closing documents option was checked in the General panel of System Preferences.)
A Web Browser Object can now have a custom pop-up menu with a link is right clicked. Use the new info(“webbrowserlinkurl”)* and info(“webbrowserlinklabel”) functions to find out what link was clicked. This new feature was used in the Panorama Help wizard to allow right clicking on a link to open a new window.
The View menu now has a separator between the last procedure and the Enter/Exit Full Screen menu item. Also, Show Tab Bar has been removed from View menu (because Panorama X has multiple types of windows, it doesn’t work properly with the default version of window tabs in macOS Sierra).
If the current database contains more than 250,000 cells (records*fields), the Find/Select dialog will always default to searching the current field even if the preference is set to search all fields.
Added preferences to specify height and width of newly created database windows.
Fixed text import CSV parser so that it handles all Hebrew characters (worked around Apple bug).
Added the clearrecord and deleteabove statements, which were in Panorama 6 but not yet brought into Panorama X.
Added the new tokenname( function, which returns the name of a field or variable (instead of the contents).
Fixed crash in batchreplace( function if one or more array elements was incomplete (didn’t have 2 both old & new values). Now incomplete elements are ignored.