[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 10 July 2003]

I am a new ISV currently converting my accounting systems from RM to Acucobol, and taking them graphic at the same time. I want to give my users the ability to view all reports before printing, and all the reports are currently character based. I thought to create a "viewer" program using the RichTextBox Active X control, but having difficulty understanding how to get the text formatted properly without the user having to select it, and also having trouble determining exactly how to make the control print.

Any ideas? Also, is there a better way to create a viewer without having to completely rewrite 350 report programs?

Thanks!

Interesting comments Dan, feel free to start a thread showing the participants a "Hello world" ACUCOBOL-GT and .net and tell us your experiences. That would be great.

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[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 10 July 2003]

I am a new ISV currently converting my accounting systems from RM to Acucobol, and taking them graphic at the same time. I want to give my users the ability to view all reports before printing, and all the reports are currently character based. I thought to create a "viewer" program using the RichTextBox Active X control, but having difficulty understanding how to get the text formatted properly without the user having to select it, and also having trouble determining exactly how to make the control print.

Any ideas? Also, is there a better way to create a viewer without having to completely rewrite 350 report programs?

Thanks!

An additional comment I'll make about .NET becoming a standard API for future Windows O/S releases is that Microsoft will need to get performance much, much better tuned than it is right now. One of the fair criticisms of .NET right now is that it can be slow and a resource hog. This issue, I think, is what will keep the Win32/64 API alive for many developers because they won't want to deal with the .NET overhead. Microsoft simply making .NET class wrappers around the Win32/64 API may not be enough, part of .NET framework may have to function at the same level of the Win32/64 API, and yet still follow .NET security policies. Sounds like MS has a problem on their hands where they may scale back or backoff the .NET Win API idea. We'll see.

I came across a good article about how Microsoft is falling short of their .NET ambitions: http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/

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[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 10 July 2003]

I am a new ISV currently converting my accounting systems from RM to Acucobol, and taking them graphic at the same time. I want to give my users the ability to view all reports before printing, and all the reports are currently character based. I thought to create a "viewer" program using the RichTextBox Active X control, but having difficulty understanding how to get the text formatted properly without the user having to select it, and also having trouble determining exactly how to make the control print.

Any ideas? Also, is there a better way to create a viewer without having to completely rewrite 350 report programs?

Thanks!

I have followed the above responses and I am very interested in using the webbrowser control to create a file viewer. I am confused however in the "few simple lines of code" needed to do this. How do I create my report as a html file? What are "tags" and how do I insert those? Plese give me a snippet of code or direct me to the acucobol manual section that will help me with this. I can't seem to figure it out.
thanks

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[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 10 July 2003]

I am a new ISV currently converting my accounting systems from RM to Acucobol, and taking them graphic at the same time. I want to give my users the ability to view all reports before printing, and all the reports are currently character based. I thought to create a "viewer" program using the RichTextBox Active X control, but having difficulty understanding how to get the text formatted properly without the user having to select it, and also having trouble determining exactly how to make the control print.

Any ideas? Also, is there a better way to create a viewer without having to completely rewrite 350 report programs?

Thanks!

If you will send me an e-mail, I will be glad to send you some code samples. You do not use the browser control to do this, but rather just a small DLL provided with your runtime package that calls windows to display the report in preview format.

All you really need to do is write your report to a file with a few simple HTML tags surrounding your formatted report text. You do have to watch the paging, and limit the fonts that your users can use, but that is pretty standard stuff.

So send me an e-mail and I will provide you the examples.

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[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 10 July 2003]

I am a new ISV currently converting my accounting systems from RM to Acucobol, and taking them graphic at the same time. I want to give my users the ability to view all reports before printing, and all the reports are currently character based. I thought to create a "viewer" program using the RichTextBox Active X control, but having difficulty understanding how to get the text formatted properly without the user having to select it, and also having trouble determining exactly how to make the control print.

Any ideas? Also, is there a better way to create a viewer without having to completely rewrite 350 report programs?

Thanks!

If you will send me an e-mail, I will be glad to send you some code samples. You do not use the browser control to do this, but rather just a small DLL provided with your runtime package that calls windows to display the report in preview format.

All you really need to do is write your report to a file with a few simple HTML tags surrounding your formatted report text. You do have to watch the paging, and limit the fonts that your users can use, but that is pretty standard stuff.

So send me an e-mail and I will provide you the examples.

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