Tuesday, February 21, 2017

EditX 2017.02.20 Version

Okay. So for new readers, what is this EditX again? 

EditX is a dropdown editbox control class to save space on forms and grid. This is especially designed to show and handle contents of memo fields. 

Another new subscriber seems to be very much interested in this especially on grid usage so after a long time, I dug this one out again. And decided to do a major overhaul to satisfy them, and of course to make it better further. 

So What is New? 

  • More responsive. Unlike on the previous versions where when inside a grid cell, you need to click twice, first on that cell to activate it then next on the arrow to fire the dropdown section, with this one you can click on the arrow straight from anywhere and it will fire outright
  • Added ReadOnly. This allows us to use this on Grid to show memo notes and to either limit it to viewing purposes only or to allow direct editing of underlying ControlSource's value
  • Cosmetic adjustments. Adjusted objects positions and sizes depending if it is on form or inside a grid. Changed down arrow to a better one.
  • Finally, cleaned up old codes and other objects and replaced those with better and leaner ones. 

Advantages of EditX vs native EditBox? 


  • On Form 
    • EditX on form eats less space than an editbox because in form, it looks like just a plain combobox with a value and a dropdown button. 

  • On Grid 
    • EditX, since it looks like a plain combobox eats less space too. But this can show the users the complete contents of a memo field. 
    • Alternative to EditX on Grid are: 
      • Using the default textbox object. On a cell, this cannot show the content of a Memo field. To counter that, we use CAST() to convert the memo field into a character one. But then you have to force your users to be satisfied with these limitations: 
        • It will show CRLF as square boxes. This can be cleaned up further via STRTRAN() but will remove paragraphs. 
        • Still partial display on long values of memo field 
        • Wider Column needed (yet still partial display) 
      • Using EditBox instead of default textbox. This will allow the content of that memo field to be shown. When this alternative approach is used, most probably the developer increases grid's RowHeight to allow the editbox to show several rows. While this gives a better way to show the contents of the memo field, it affects other objects though because you can't dynamically change RowHeight based on the content of the editbox. So the rest of the other cells are forced to have the same height and it is not that good too, visually speaking. Plus this action results to lesser rows to display on Grid. 
With EditX, you don't have to worry about those. See for yourself (click on image to see those on actual size)!

















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1 comment:

  1. This is seem very interesting, in fact very easy to use and to deploy, thanks as always

    ReplyDelete