Discussion about Unifield and Edit Box functionalities
Author: adrian.gosbell@synapse-i.jp (Adrian Gosbell)
About the whole unifield topic, these are still in the product solely for legacy purposes. We have a lot of old apps out there that still use them, and in the case of character mod (CHUI), it's the only option. The Uniface 9 developer would be a good example of a legacy Uniface app. From a Uniface perspective, we advise to use the editbox rather than the unifield. We've implemented a lot of enhancements over the years into the editbox, we've consciously not done this with the unifield because we don't get all of the Windows libraries to build against, and we don't want to break anything (CHIU apps tend to be the most mission critical apps in the Uniface world). As a brief history lesson, the unifield is completely Uniface proprietary, built by us pretty well from the ground up because 'back in the day', we had GUI's like Mac, OS/2, Motif, CHIU, Windows 3.1, and we needed to deliver GUI controls which were consistent across all of them (the name Uniface came from Universal Interface). The industry, and Uniface has moved on, the decision was made in the Uniface 8 era to solely focus on the Windows GUI (CHIU is still there, and in the case of the Mac, we had no choice). As far as I am aware, the only unifield functionality that is not available in the editbox is the handling of the bold, italic and underline attributes on stored data, last time we looked into that, we couldn't find a realistic way to come up with an editbox alternative. if there are other functional reasons not to use the editbox I'd like to know so we can see if we can do something about that.




