(Original creator: thenees)

In this final episode of the story about modernizing the Uniface 9.7 IDF in 10 easy steps I will explain how we changed the look of the buttons.

If you want to start reading from the beginning part 1 and 2 of the story can be found here: Modernizing Uniface 9.7 in 10 easy steps Modernizing Uniface 9.7, Part 2 Again, in theory, it should be possible to do this by just changing a few properties in a configurations file. But as you will see it takes a bit more effort to do it in a nice way in an existing Uniface application. Don’t get me wrong, even with the additional work it still was not much effort to do it. The small tools that I made to make my life easier are available for download, but:

Step 7 Determine types of buttons

Goal

Now that we changed the color of the Forms and fixed what was needed for that, we focused on the Command Buttons. The requirement was to use flat buttons. In theory you would only need to change the properties for the Command Button in the .ini file for that. But we have different types of buttons in the IDF and we do not want to style them all in the same way. So we wanted to split up the Command Button in five logical widgets.

Logical Widgets

The first step was to split all buttons into groups and create logical widgets for them in the .ini file so they can styled as a group. These are the logical widgets that we used for the buttons:

Since flat buttons and clickable images may not look clickable to people who are not used to them, we added cursor=uhand to each button so the mouse arrow changes to a hand when you go over a button.

Tool

Splitting the Command Buttons in these five logical widgets was a lot of work so I made a tool to assist in this mostly-manual step. I used the tool to query for fields with a Command Button widget, and in another window I looked in the IDF what new logical widget it should be. The main advantage of the tool for this step was making sure that I did not miss any buttons. The tool is called U97_FRMWIDGETS. You can enter a retrieve profile and then work on the properties of the found painted fields. You can delete a property regardless of its value, or only when it has a specific value. You can also Add (or replace) properties in four ways: apply it to all records, do not replace existing values, only replace existing values, only replace a specific existing value. You can also apply a new widget type to all records.



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Step 8 Match modeled widgets with painted widgets

Goal

In the previous step we determined what painted button should get which new logical widget. But the Development Environment also uses buttons that are modeled in dummy entities in the application model. We want to give them a new logical widget too.

Challenge

You would expect that a modeled button is always used for that same purpose. But in an older application, such programming standards have not always been followed. So now one button in the application model needs to be represented by multiple logical widgets. The only affordable solution was to change the logical widget in the model to the one that is most often used for this button in the Forms.

Tool

The tool and the SQL that I used for this step was of such a ‘quick and dirty’ quality that I will not share this one with you. But it did the trick anyway, and you can easily come up with something similar (or better!)

Step 9 Set the properties on the painted buttons

Goal

We have split the buttons in logical groups by using logical widgets. Now we needed to remove the local properties so they do not override those set in the .ini file.

Challenge

It would be simple if we could just delete all properties of all buttons, but that was not feasible as there was a mix of properties that should be the same on each button and of properties that are specific for a certain button.

Tool

I used my tool U97_FRMWIDGETS from step 7 to remove all properties except ROLE and VSIZE from the IDFButtonsBottom. And I removed all properties except TOOLTIP and VSIZE from the small image buttons. This now allows us to control all other properties from the .ini file.

Step 10 Set the properties on the modeled buttons

Goal

For the modeled buttons we also needed to remove many properties. As they often did not have properties on the Form, the properties from the Model took precedence over the .ini file instead.

Challenge

The challenge was to efficiently change the properties of modeled buttons.

Tool

The tool is called U97_MODWIDGETS. It is similar to the tool of step 7, but acts on a different entity of the DICT model. For more details see step 7.

Conclusion

We here at Uniface B.V. have a big Uniface 10 project running to change the architecture of the Uniface Development environment. But we still wanted to do a very small project to freshen up the appearance of Uniface 9 as well. I think we succeeded in that, thereby proving that it is affordable to apply some lipstick to an existing Uniface application.

Wishes

Making the background of all screens white showed up some things in our GUI that can be improved in the future.

1. The frames and sizes of our widgets are not fully consistent. That was nicely camouflaged by the grey background of the forms, but it shows more clearly on a white background.
2. The new entity frame properties work fine and allow you to really spice up your application. We will get a blog post up on this soon. But in a multi-occurrence situation, where the entity is made to look like a grid, there is room for further development. There is no room for the frame, causing some visual imperfections.
3. We have buttons that used to have an image on them in Uniface 7, but not since then. These are still image buttons. In previous Uniface versions that was not a problem as we used a Windows representation for the buttons and that ignores the image. But in Uniface 9.7 we use flat buttons with a Uniface representation and there the image prevents correct centering of the text. We could not find an affordable risk-free solution within the scope of the project so we decided to deliver with this imperfection in place. We will let you know when we have a good approach for this.

These and some smaller issues have been logged during the project and have been put in our backlog for resolution at a later date according to priority. I hope these posts on how we changed the look of our Uniface application were useful for you.

Have fun modernizing your Uniface application!

With kind regards, Theo Neeskens