Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Print Preview window focus

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Print Preview window focus

    In V8 it looks as though print preview window behavior has changed .... the print preview windows is opening blank before the report has actually been generated. This causes problems with focus and situations when there is actually nothing to display.

    Is there a way to control this or is this something I should submit as a bug?

    Thanks in advance ...

    Glenn

    #2
    Re: Print Preview window focus

    One thing that changed from v7 -> v8 is that the previews launched from the control panel are *not* session-modal. This is because session-modal preview windows cause the control panel to become disabled (which requires that the user *exit* the preview before returning to the control panel).

    Is this what you mean, or are you talking about a change in the report automation (i.e. launch a report from a button on a form) - which should not have changed from v7.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Print Preview window focus

      Cian,
      control panel is hidden ..... running report from button on form. Worked fine in prior release ..... something changed??

      Glenn

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Print Preview window focus

        Originally posted by peterg000 View Post
        In V8 it looks as though print preview window behavior has changed .... the print preview windows is opening blank before the report has actually been generated. This causes problems with focus and situations when there is actually nothing to display.

        Is there a way to control this or is this something I should submit as a bug?

        Thanks in advance ...

        Glenn

        i am not seeing this in alphasports. it seems the same as it did in v7 to me.

        do you see a difference in alphasports?

        if not, and the difference is only apparent in your app, can you post your app.

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Print Preview window focus

          Selwyn,
          Yes it happens in Alphasports ...... preview window opens before the dialog box that displays status of generated report. Alphasports doesnt have much data and goes pretty quick, so you may not be seeing it. If you run against anything that has alot of data where the Dialog box for generating the report stays up for a while, you will see that a blank preview window opens before it and stays in the background until report is generated.

          Glenn

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Print Preview window focus

            I have a report that takes about 6 seconds to generate, and I can verify what you describe, but why is it an issue?
            Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
            972 524 8714
            [email protected]

            ____________________
            "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Print Preview window focus

              I looked over the code, and discovered that we did indeed make a change (in the patch) to print preview for a vista bug. We used to wait *before* the preview for any pending messages to be processed - the reason we removed this is because Vista was processing messages differently - and was getting stuck (due to reentrancy issues) inside this loop. I will take a look at adding an 'if not Vista' block, and we can condition this code instead of removing it.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Print Preview window focus

                Glenn,

                Here is a modified version of a5rbase.dll that conditions the change I mentioned on running Vista (reverts to the old behavior when running XP or earlier).

                If you install this old DLL over the patched version of alpha five version 8, does the problem still exist?

                Thanks,
                Cian

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Print Preview window focus

                  Cian,
                  Didnt work ..... Preview window still opening first before report is fully generated.

                  Martin ..... first off, thank you for at least making me feel like im not going crazy and verifying the behavior. To your question about why I care. First .... old school says dont show something unless there is something to show. I also think because i am launching from a dialog window, it causing some of the hange conditions im experiencing.

                  Thanks again ...

                  Glenn

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Print Preview window focus

                    Cian,
                    Went into my action script and changed the Option "window style" for the "preview layout" action to run in modal window and it now works. Would this have worked without your change around vista?

                    Glenn

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Print Preview window focus

                      Hi Glenn,

                      This might well have worked without this change back, but selwyn reported to me this morning that he noticed that the print progress dialog was not updating correctly - which is more likely the reason this code was in there.

                      As to the pre-checking for records (i.e. don't print report if it doesn't have any records) I was under the impression that there was code that did this, but that it was only invoked for modal *because* it could double the time it took. The problem is that the report preview as it is currently implemented requires a context to write to, so the query for 'how many records' must be done twice - this resulted in earlier complaints of some reports taking longer to display, when it actual fact the extra time was be spent trying to determine if there were any records in the report (i.e. the query getting run twice).

                      Ideally, report preview should probably be re-written at some point to read from a generated image (i.e. like a metafile) - in this way, the first page could be generated *before* anything is displayed, and the report preview card can be made into a generic progressive meta-file viewer instead.

                      Regards,
                      Cian

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Print Preview window focus

                        Hi Glenn,

                        Selwyn told me that the setting

                        View-settings
                        Preferences
                        Reports
                        Precalculate Report Count


                        To 'Yes' restores the behaviour where alpha five doesn't bring up the preview window until it has determined that there are records.

                        Cian

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: Print Preview window focus

                          Cian,
                          Completely agree with your re-write solution. But for now as long as I understand the rules and know that it may take longer for my report if i use modal .... at least its a choice i can make.

                          Thanks again for your help, cant tell you how much its appreciated to see yourself and everone at Alpha concerned with making sure V8 is a success. So far for me, V8 is a tremendous improvement and based on the speed that Alpha is working on fixes, it should be solid in no time.

                          Thanks again!!!

                          Glenn

                          Comment

                          Working...
                          X