[archive] Docking Windows Control

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Hi Rob. Docking controls are very interesting, I have always wondered how an acucobol control displayed on a pane and the acucobol display manager would react to the pane being moved or resized. Painting, position tracking, refreshing issues, etc. I mean can a docking pane really act as a container for an acucobol control/window? Would it fight with the acucobol display manager over the positioning of the acucobol control/window?
Also, I would think a key ingredient to getting this to work correctly, is properly receiving, and acting upon the events from the docking control. I'm curious what your progress is thus far.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Hi Rob. Docking controls are very interesting, I have always wondered how an acucobol control displayed on a pane and the acucobol display manager would react to the pane being moved or resized. Painting, position tracking, refreshing issues, etc. I mean can a docking pane really act as a container for an acucobol control/window? Would it fight with the acucobol display manager over the positioning of the acucobol control/window?
Also, I would think a key ingredient to getting this to work correctly, is properly receiving, and acting upon the events from the docking control. I'm curious what your progress is thus far.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Hi Rob. Docking controls are very interesting, I have always wondered how an acucobol control displayed on a pane and the acucobol display manager would react to the pane being moved or resized. Painting, position tracking, refreshing issues, etc. I mean can a docking pane really act as a container for an acucobol control/window? Would it fight with the acucobol display manager over the positioning of the acucobol control/window?
Also, I would think a key ingredient to getting this to work correctly, is properly receiving, and acting upon the events from the docking control. I'm curious what your progress is thus far.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

You got me curious, so last night I downloaded the trial version of this control and did a quick prototype(see attached). It appears to work, but with some strange side affects. Here's a list:

The blue placeholder icon for the docking control remains on the screen, this does not happen in VB.

I couldn't completely turn off the acucobol independent window border, which causes a strange display affect in a pane. The VB tutorial says the window border should be none.

Scaling of the independent window inside the pane seems a bit off, which may have to do with the independant window not having pixel sizing capability or the border issue. The VB tutorial says the window scalemode should be pixel.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Dan,

You've made my day. When I was attempting to use this control, I essentially had something similar to what you had, but when I used the CreatePane method, I never got a handle back. Therefore, I never really got anywhere... I'm about to go through my code to see what the differences are. I know one difference is that I was using floating windows, but if I change your sample to floating windows, it still works...

Thanks for being curious and I'll let you know if I learn anymore. This answers my initial question as to whether to try and pursue this or not. Seems like it's worth a shot!

Regards,
Rob

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Dan,

I was able to get the control to work fine in our application, but I continue to get exceptions of 99s in the accepts that we have. Without the control, we're fine. With the control, we loop through the accept logic with 99s.

I've looked into using other Docking Controls such as ActiveBar by DataDynamics and DockStudioXP by Innovasys. I keep getting stuck though when their VB examples refer to using "Form1". I've asked their support for a C example of how it would work, but so far no answers...

CodeJock used only a Hwnd, which is easy to get. I have no idea why these other controls are looking for the Form handle.

We're still plugging along...

Rob

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Dan,

I was able to get the control to work fine in our application, but I continue to get exceptions of 99s in the accepts that we have. Without the control, we're fine. With the control, we loop through the accept logic with 99s.

I've looked into using other Docking Controls such as ActiveBar by DataDynamics and DockStudioXP by Innovasys. I keep getting stuck though when their VB examples refer to using "Form1". I've asked their support for a C example of how it would work, but so far no answers...

CodeJock used only a Hwnd, which is easy to get. I have no idea why these other controls are looking for the Form handle.

We're still plugging along...

Rob

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Dan,

I was able to get the control to work fine in our application, but I continue to get exceptions of 99s in the accepts that we have. Without the control, we're fine. With the control, we loop through the accept logic with 99s.

I've looked into using other Docking Controls such as ActiveBar by DataDynamics and DockStudioXP by Innovasys. I keep getting stuck though when their VB examples refer to using "Form1". I've asked their support for a C example of how it would work, but so far no answers...

CodeJock used only a Hwnd, which is easy to get. I have no idea why these other controls are looking for the Form handle.

We're still plugging along...

Rob

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Rob, yes, I noticed the exception 99 timeouts happening too. I tried adding BEFORE TIME to the accept but it did not help. The only way to keep the accept stable was to wrap it in a PERFORM UNTIL and check exceptions to know when to exit the perform loop like this:


|escape code 99(timeout) happens so wrap in perform until
PERFORM WITH TEST AFTER UNTIL KEY-STATUS = EXIT-ACCEPT
   ACCEPT ENT-FIELD
      ON EXCEPTION
      ACCEPT ESCAPE-CODE FROM ESCAPE KEY
      PERFORM CHECK-KEY-STATUS
   END-ACCEPT
END-PERFORM


CHECK-KEY-STATUS would just check what exception occured and set a KEY-STATUS flag to control the looping. Similiar to ACCEPT-ESCAPE-CODE.
But this additional PERFORM UNTIL business should really be unecessary to combat error 99 timeouts that shouldn't be happening. I wonder if Acucorp support could help figure out why the accepts timeout when using the docking control? Perhaps the docking control is affecting the messages the acucobol window is trying to pass to it's child entry field control. Who knows?
But if this is what has to be done, I wonder if your STANDARD-ACCEPT routines could be easily adjusted?

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Dan,

We have a loop like this already, but the problem is that you cannot enter more than 1 character in the field before it terminates with a 99! I have a sample program that I'm sending to AcuCorp support to get their input. Yesterday, we discovered that it only occurs on Graphical entry field accept.

I'll let you know what we learn.

Rob

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2004]

Thanks to Dan and Gisle for their suggestions on a previous post I had regarding keeping floating windows together. I am currently considering this as a viable option. While researching this and other issues, I noticed that there are numerous ActiveX controls that exist for docking windows. I've been messing around with CodeJock's Xtreme Docking control and I'm not getting very far, but it seems to do what I need.

Has anyone used one of these with AcuCobol? Is there any reason to believe that these wouldn't work due to some limitation? Just checking before I spend a lot of time on this.

Thanks,
Rob

Originally posted by Robstan
Dan,
We have a loop like this already, but the problem is that you cannot enter more than 1 character in the field before it terminates with a 99!
Rob

Right, that happened to me too. If the loop remains, and ignores the 99, then you stay in a looped accept. This works, but is not a good solution to the problem, because I don't think ignoring a 99 in a real application is a good idea.
Also, certain exceptions don't work for some weird reason, like the Tab key for instance. Function keys are ok though. Weird.
I hope acucorp support and/or development can shed some light. Thanks for the update.