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
Devcon 2020 Goes Virtual! LEARN MORE >

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

A5 Title

Collapse
X
Collapse
 
  • Page of 2
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
Previous 1 2 template Next
    #16
    Re: A5 Title

    Thankyou Jo,

    I think I know what you are saying. Assign the icon to the alpha5.exe. This is fine but is it possible to do it in code using the autoexec? My goal would be set the db title and icon on opening no matter what db it is and no matter if a shortcut exists or not. I can do the title thanks to stan, but canniot do the icon

    I will add to the wish list to have something like this possible in the database properties
    -----------------------------------------------
    Regards
    Mark Pearson
    [email protected]
    Youtube channel
    Website

    Comment

      #17
      Re: A5 Title

      Mark,

      I am not sure if you can do that or not. If you get it to work from the autoexec or some other way after the app is starting, it still leaves the a5 icon up until that happens. This can be a couple seconds to much longer.

      Just logistics. LOL



      .
      Dave Mason
      [email protected]
      Skype is dave.mason46

      Comment

        #18
        Re: A5 Title

        Originally posted by Tom Henkel View Post
        We use the "appname".startup method that ...
        Code:
        -TITLE="Social Services"
-SPLASH="G:\BCBSS\seal.bmp"
-MAXIMIZE
-ICON="G:\BERGEN2.ICO"
        This doesn't answer the original question but it may help some developers.

        The problem with the above is that the application - or at least the splash and icon - MUST be installed in the specified folders in the G: drive. I see this being done a LOT and I believe it's because this is the default format (with the full path) when the .startup file is created.

        If you remove the folder specification and just use the plain file name, Alpha will check the application folder and the .exe folder for the file.

        The default for the "-icon", "-splash", and "-include" options is first the Alpha Five program directory and then the .adb folder. If any of these items are in another directory, they will require the full path name. This is one important change required if you want to allow the user to put the application anywhere they want. (And, yes, I'm one of those people - and not the only one - who will often refuse to install an application that MUST go in a specific folder.)

        Another advantage is that this makes the command line shorter if you want to specify all this in the command line rather than putting it in a separate text file.

        Comment

          #19
          Re: A5 Title

          Cal,

          With over 200 machines connected to the application on the network, we needed to standardize on a single "mapped" drive letter for our network path. Deploying the ICON and Bitmaps to each machine would be insane. For our purposes, this was the most expedient. I guess I could have used a hard URL, but if we change servers some day, then I would need to change the routine as well.

          Tom

          Comment

            #20
            Re: A5 Title

            That makes sense Tom. I don't usually think of the G: drive as being a mapped drive - so that idea didn't even cross my mind. In your case, I agree with you completely - partly because you have full control over the network and the installations.

            My main reason for commenting on it was because I've had a number of people create .startup files like that with hard coded paths for generic apps and then ask me for help because it doesn't work when they send it to customers. So, in the case of generic apps, I recommend putting those files in the application folder and either including them in the "<AppName>.Network_optimization_additional_files" for network installations or installing them on the workstation with the initial workstation installation. When you don't have the luxury of controlling the network, you have to plan accordingly.

            Comment

              #21
              Re: A5 Title

              I agree completely.

              Since I don't work in the "generic" world, I usually don't think in those terms, probably something I should work on...:o


              Tom

              Comment

                #22
                Re: A5 Title

                For a different reason, I do not like mapped drives. Users can knowingly or not have access to the real main files. That "G" or other drive is directly to those files.

                I do use the url and have had no problems.

                Maybe I do it different? I make a complete runtime on one computer and just copy it to all the other computers. May not be the right way, but has worked for me.

                If you do a drive letter, you have to set this up on all computers as well as install your app. If the server is changed, you have to either remap the letter or be sure the "name of the server" is the same. It is no different with the url method.

                see below the startup on install.
                Once this is done from the bootstrap, all works well and you can copy this to each computer as an app.
                ***NOTE
                I keep the app and rtuntime in one folder so when it is copied to the next computer, it is complete.

                This has helped me in other ways with updating windows, my apps are still running from v7 that were not supposed to. NOT including win7

                Hope it helps someone.
                .
                Dave Mason
                [email protected]
                Skype is dave.mason46

                Comment

                  #23
                  Re: A5 Title

                  Dave,

                  As I've stated in other posts, we also use a wonderful product called "Ground Control" from Acrasoft. It is an incredibly powerful tool that can map drives, run macros, and do myriad other things. We run it on machine startup to insure that all drives are mapped appropriately and even to check to see if there is an application update to install. If we do need to change drive mappings, we need to change one routine that sits on a url-mapped server, which is called by all machines in the agency.

                  For deploying shadows, I build one copy of the shadow on my machine. I then use winzip to create a self extracting zip which will extract the files to the proper place on all the user machines. If Ground Control sees a trigger file, it forces the self-extracting zip to run, and all the machines are updated when they boot.

                  This has helped so much, we're spoiled.

                  Tom

                  Comment

                    #24
                    Re: A5 Title

                    Tom,

                    Very good!

                    I use astrum as my installer, so I can make sure the registry, and all else is consistent. Sounds like we are doing the same things, just different.



                    .
                    Dave Mason
                    [email protected]
                    Skype is dave.mason46

                    Comment

                    Previous 1 2 template Next
                    Working...
                    X