Looking for Better Progress Bar

[Charles Hoens]

I was looking over some old code in the archives, specifically the progress bar.

I was looking for something akin to what Alpha itself uses for updating the program or when Alpha updates a shadow dbf. You know, the one with the green or blue large blocks.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

[user10]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Try this
http://msgboard.alphasoftware.com/al...for-you-to-use

[Keith Hubert]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Hi Charles,

Have you looked at the Wait dialog in Action Scripts?

[Charles Hoens]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Yes Keith. I've looked at them all. The Wait Dialog does not (as far as I can see) allow you to modify the type of progress bar. I'm looking for something a bit more flashy.

[Peter.Greulich]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Charles,

Not sure how much "flash' Alpha provides out of the box, but you can always roll your own. You can do it in a dialog form, using objects - e.g square text objects and dynamically apply color/show/hide/etc. It could even be a continuous progress bar. You just have to build in the flash. The only problem with using a dialog is the initial load time. But if it's important to you you could pre-load the dialog hidden.

And, of course, you could build an xdialog to your taste from scratch - w/o and speed penalty.

[Charles Hoens]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Thanks for the ideas Peter. One other question on this. Could I use a JavaScript progress bar and call it from desktop? There is a function out there like a5_run_javascript(), but I don't know if that is even possible.

[Peter.Greulich]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Charles,

I just did a quick test of a blank form with a button:

A5_Run_JavaScript("alert('Test');")

And it didn't work.

So maybe it works under certain conditions. Don't know. Since you can embed a web component in a form or xdialog there's probably a way. You would have to experiment. But it might just be easier to roll your own.

[Charles Hoens]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Yeah...I like it "roll my own". Maybe I'll do that now, and it will come to me!

Thanks Peter!

[Peter.Greulich]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Charles,

Attached is an export package of a form.

Import it into your copy of Alpha Sports.

View the form.

You might not like my crazy color scheme but you get the idea. The sky's the limit!

ProgressBar.a5pkg

P.S. I built this in v12 but it should run in v11

[CALocklin]

Re: Looking for Better Progress Bar

Charles,

Not sure how much "flash' Alpha provides out of the box, but you can always roll your own. You can do it in a dialog form, using objects - e.g square text objects and dynamically apply color/show/hide/etc. It could even be a continuous progress bar. You just have to build in the flash. The only problem with using a dialog is the initial load time. But if it's important to you you could pre-load the dialog hidden.

And, of course, you could build an xdialog to your taste from scratch - w/o and speed penalty.

Actually, there's one other problem with using an xdialog. However, it's only an issue if your wait time is long enough that the user will try to do something else while it finishes running. Every time the xdialog is called/refreshed, the computer screen will jump back to the A5 window. This is why I changed all the Please Wait messages in my AIMS App Analyzer to WaitDialogs. When updating the documentation table on a large application it can take 5-10 minutes so I like to check email, check the internet, or at least play a game while it's running. Having the screen jump back to A5 every few seconds makes doing that rather unrealistic/unbearable. If your wait time is only 30 seconds to a minute or so, go with an xdialog because the user won't be going anywhere else anyway. If it can be longer than that, I suggest staying with the waitdialog unless you can find some other method that doesn't cause it to constantly jump back to the A5 window.