Strange behavior

[alfatrading]

I'm following the lessons from Steve Workings to get acquainted with Alpha Five before starting doing something serious with it.
I get a strange behaviour when I try to add another component into an a5w page that already has one.
In this last issue, I'm at the ending of the lesson 6.7 "Using a Dialog to Print a PDF Report to the Browser". I open my a5w page named Customers - that already contains a grid component to show the customer grid (search, show and edit), go to the bottom of the page in the WYSIWYG tab, clic on the proper button to insert the dlg_print component, and thi somehow disrupts the page, leaving me with some unwanted characters at the very start of the WYSIWYG page; something like in the attached picture.
I tried a workaround recreating the page from scratch and adding the two component, but the result is the same.
Do I have to learn how the HTML for each component is inserted in the page and do it by myself?
Could be closing and restarting Alpha Five an option?
From the CSDA Code Utility, its description and the testimonials, and from other thread I saw here (for example http://msgboard.alphasoftware.com/al...ad.php?t=82704) I fear that Alpha Five might be a little 'erratic' and that my worst nightmares with Ms Access for the many workarounds I need to invent everytime are not due.
Hope someone could reassure me.
Thanks
Fabio Mantovani

[alfatrading]

Re: Strange behavior

Going crazy with this: neither restarting A5, nor editing html myself: I close the file and reopening is it again an unreadable source.
Why A5 doesn't respect the indent and code shaping I choose?
I attached the code for helpig help me.
Thanks

[csda1]

Re: Strange behavior

Hi Fabio,

....From the CSDA Code Utility, its description and the testimonials, and from other thread I saw here (for example http://msgboard.alphasoftware.com/al...ad.php?t=82704) I fear that Alpha Five might be a little 'erratic' and that my worst nightmares with Ms Access for the many workarounds I need to invent everytime are not due.
Hope someone could reassure me.

The thread you are talking about only talks about A5V1 to a5V10. A5V1 and A5V2, and to some extent A5V3, were quite different in terms of the underlying code and abilities. From A5V5 to A5V10, I have not found any real problems, certainly no more than you would find in any program, and most are workable.

As for the CSDA Code Utility, It doesn't say that Alpha crashes a lot, just that it is very handy restarting after a crash of Alpha Five. If you run into this rare problem, it saves restarting time, as you typically do it a lot until you find the source of the crash. (I will update the web site to remove any inference that Alpha regularly crashes, which is not the intent).

Crashes are something that typically happens when creating Windows API or Active X interfaces, not while using Alpha 5 (not to say that it doesn't happen). It most often happens during development. It's typical to see most users go into an infinite loop (acts like a crash), or people who push the very limits of Alpha Five by using undocumented commands (of which I am one of the worst offenders :D, unfortunately, a consequence of creating a utility that hooks into Alpha Five).

The number of crash failures that people have are due to not following good methodologies and the asynchronous manner hat Alpha Five runs. By dimensioning and using functions, many of these problems disappear.

The rest are relatively small, and very often it is tied to the methodology. used.

But don't interpret all the complaints on the board as an indication that Alpha Five is bad. It just means people are using it, and post something when they have a problem. Most people don't post when they have no problem, so the message board complaints are always large in comparison.

In general, you must decide if Alpha Five or any software tool is better to use with their issues than alternative ones. I, and I'm sure many others would answer an unqualified yes!

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: Strange behavior

Ciao Fabio,

I took a quick look at your Customer page, and it is, indeed, messed up. Here's a quick lesson on how the page source layout:
Generally, html "tags" come in pairs like <html></html> where <html> is the start of the section and </html> is the end of the section.
On the source tab, you will see:

<!doctype ... en"> this is optional and tells the browser what kind of coding this document uses. Can be left or removed.

<link ... screen> these link stylesheets to the page and are really not needed. You can remove them (no closing tag on this type of tag)

<!-- --> this indicates an html comment and can be ignored.

<html> this marks the start of the page
<head> this is the start of the head section

blocks of Xbasic code go here in the "head" section. Eadh block starts with "<%a5" and ends with "%>" There will be one block for each component on the page. The block creates the code to display the component and stores it in a variable.

</head> end of the head
<body> start of the body section

The body is where everything that appears on the page is placed.

</body>
</html>

Your problem is one of the component code blocks that should be in the head section is in the body, so it displays on the WYSIWYG screes as "Xbasic code block" and the text that follows, the links to the stylesheets, appears as text. It should also be in the head section.

This page might be a good learning tool for you, but if you want to display the page, it is easier to just start over on this page from the beginning.

Pat

[marvinbase]

Re: Strange behavior

Running Windows XP? Sounds like Windows Update KB956844- this update causes extra code to be entered, a known issue with Alpha5 v8 and v9, but fixed in v10.

Current direction from Alpha is to rollback from KB956844. Here's a link to a thread about it. From personal experience, even after rolling back, it was easiest to create new A5 pages and add the web components again to get clean code.