Alpha Four Blinking Fields

[Rene Guzman]

Can anyone tell me how to duplicate AlhaFour's Blinking Colors? I need a field to blink only if it is not blank. Any help on this matter will be greatly appreciated. Thank You!

[davej]

RE: Alpha Four Blinking Fields

Rene,

A form has an OnTimer event and a Timer property. These can be manipulated to change color at a specified frequency based on a condition you want.

On one of my application, I have a field called 'FROZEN'. If a vacant position is frozen, that is, no one can be hired to fill it, the field blinks to draw the operator's attention to that fact. The following code is in the form's OnTimer event. Whether 'FROZEN' appears or not is based on a user-entered field, which only accepts a 'Y' or an 'N' - a 'Y' triggers the blinking, an 'N' does not.

IF FROZEN.font.color="Dark Green" THEN
FROZEN.font.color="red"
FROZEN.font.size=12
ELSE
FROZEN.font.color="Dark Green"
FROZEN.font.size=14
END IF

Hope this helps.

Dave

[Rene Guzman]

RE: Alpha Four Blinking Fields

Thank You! I'll try that and let you know how it works out.

[Ronald Anusiewicz]

RE: Alpha Four Blinking Fields

I would like to know if anyone uses this technique.

I tried doing this and had to abandon this idea. While the blinking text worked 'OK', doing this inhibits the form resulting in unpredictable results. Button pushes, pop-up boxes, data entry; they just did not funtion the same as with the form's on timer shut off.

Ron

[martinwcole]

RE: Alpha Four Blinking Fields

Ron, my own experience with using a form's on timer event is that it works best when the timer only fires maybe every 30 seconds or even every minute. If you set it to fire every second, in a scenario as in the above, and you have a big main form, it would have to interfere, as every second it is resetting things.

However, on tiny forms, where the operator maybe has only 1 or 2 entries and then exits, it works well. For example, in 2 apps that run in a hospital environment in ER and other critical areas, nurses will begin entering results and have to leave the record unfinished to handle an emergency.

There is a main form, and forms that are opened as dialogs.
It the operator enters a new patient or edits a new patient (the main form), and leaves it and it gets minimized and or covered, the record is locked on the network. When they enter a child using the dialogs, I lock the parent until they get back - thus also locking the parent record on the network.

I set the main form's ontimer to 1 minute, and the dialogs to 1 second - if the main form is not saved in 5 minutes, I close the dialogs and close the parent and leave a warning for the operator, thus freeing the network. The child form displays a countdown for them showing how much time is left, and it closes in 4 minutes - thus freeing the network.

I would avoid an every-second timer on a big form.