Tag Archives: WINDOW

The WRITEATRECORD property

The OpenInsight ATRECORD property is an easy way of updating data in your forms in a similar fashion to the way the “@Record” variable worked in Advanced Revelation, but it does suffers from one potential drawback: Any fields in the data record set via ATRECORD that are not bound to a control on the form are not updated when the form contents are saved.

Of course there is a reason for this: OpenInsight forms only update individual fields in a record when saving data rather than the entire record, and it is this capability that allows it to implement the “Ignore Self Locks” feature that means you can use more than one form to simultaneously edit data in the same record.

Still, not every scenario calls for this level of finesse, so Openinsight 10 introduces a new WINDOW property called WRITEATRECORD. When set to TRUE$ all data set via the ATRECORD property is written to disk, just like “@Record” in Advanced Revelation.

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

Taskbar Integration – Progress Bars

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One of the most useful features introduced with the Windows 7 taskbar was the ability to display progress information directly on your form’s taskbar button. OpenInsight 10 exposes this functionality via two new WINDOW properties:

PROGRESSVALUE
PROGRESSSTATE

PROGRESSVALUE Property

This is a simple @fm-delimited array composed of two fields that contain the current progress value (i.e. the proportion complete) and the maximum progress value (i.e. the value when completed).

Example:

PROGRESSVALUE of 50,100

Note that this property is set-only.

PROGRESSSTATE Property

This property specifies the appearance of the progress bar. It can be one of the following values:

“0” – No progress Information
“1” – Normal (green)
“2” – Error (red)
“3” – Paused (yellow)
“4” – Indeterminate (this results in a marquee-style effect)

Example:

PROGRESSSTATE of 2

PROGRESSSTATE of 3

Note that this property is set-only.

Further reading

More information on taskbar Progress Bars can be found here, along with some guidelines on their usage here.

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

Taskbar Integration – Overlay Icons

OVERLAYICON property

This property allows you to specify an icon that will be superimposed onto the bottom right of your form’s taskbar button. It is designed to highlight a status change in your program and is used by applications such as MSN Messenger to denote the user’s online status.

This property is similar to the standard ICON property where you simply specify the name and path of an icon file, or it’s DLL resource ID.

Example:

Form without an overlay icon

Form with an overlay icon

Further reading

More information on Overlay Icons can be found here, along with some guidelines on their usage here.

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

OpenInsight and High-DPI

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With the increasing popularity of high-resolution monitors, one of the biggest usability problems today is the display size of text and UI controls, because they appear smaller as the screen resolution increases. The recommended advice to overcome this is to increase the DPI (dots-per-inch) setting of the system, thereby enlarging these elements and making them easier to see and read. If you’ve been using Windows Vista and above you’ve probably already seen this Control Panel applet that allows you to easily change your DPI settings:

Windows 7 DPI Control Panel Applet

However, unless an application is designed to be DPI-aware this can result in some unsatisfactory results, such as over-large fonts, clipped controls and blurry windows. This is because many older Windows applications assume a constant DPI (96) when setting font and size coordinates and they do not apply any scaling to these values, thereby resulting in the aforementioned problems.

(NB. The “magic number” of 96 that you’ll see throughout this post is due to the fact that at 96 DPI one logical pixel is equal to one screen pixel – this is the “100%” setting in the Control Panel applet shown above).

In an effort to accommodate these applications Microsoft have introduced a couple of OS features over the years:

On Windows XP the system fonts and some system UI elements are scaled up at runtime, but this leads to the common problem of text appearing larger and being clipped as the actual size of the bounding control is usually not scaled.

On Windows Vista and above a feature called “DPI-virtualization” automatically scales windows belonging to an application not marked as “DPI-aware” – in effect they are rendered at 96 DPI to an off-screen bitmap, resized, and then drawn to the screen, but this can result in some blurry windows due to pixel stretching. OpenInsight 10 is marked as a DPI-aware application so will not be subjected to DPI-virtualization.

OpenInsight 10, High-DPI and automatic scaling.

OpenInsight 10 supports High-DPI by automatically scaling-up all GUI objects at runtime when created through the SYSTEM object’s CREATE method (formerly known as the “Utility CREATE service”). This affects the following two properties:

Size coordinates
Fonts

The actual scaling for coordinates is calculated by the following simple formula:

screenPixels = logicalPixels * ( currentDPI / 96 )

For example, if you create a control with a size of 200×100 and you are running at 144 DPI (i.e. 150% as per the Control Panel applet above) then the control will be created with an actual size of 300×150 pixels.

The font point size is similarly multiplied by the scaling factor (i.e. currentDPI / 96 ).

Supporting images under High-DPI

Another noticeable issue when running at high DPI settings are images, which are assumed to have been designed for 96 DPI and therefore have to be scaled up at runtime leading to a potential loss of quality due to the resize. To help with this the tool-set has been extended to allow repository BITMAP entities to specify multiple image files when being defined. The first will be used for 96 DPI (100%), the second for up to 120 DPI (125%), the third for up to 144 DPI (150%) the fourth for up to 192 DPI (200%) and so on, with further images being defined at 48 DPI (50%) increments (for future-proofing). When a control is created at runtime the system picks the appropriate image size and scales it as needed (preferably down where possible) before applying any other transformations.

Note that this does NOT apply to images set at runtime in code via the BITMAP property. In this case the developer is assumed to have selected the correct image file size regardless of the DPI setting.

Designing under High-DPI

If you design your forms when running under a High-DPI setting the Form Designer will save and compile all coordinate and font information as though you were developing at 96DPI, so the values will be scaled down appropriately.

Opting out of automatic scaling

Of course, we always try our best not to break existing applications so you can set an option in the RXI file to turn off the automatic DPI scaling if you wish (this option is exposed at runtime via the read-only SYSTEM DPISCALING property).

This same principle can also be applied to individual windows at design-time so you can use it selectively as needed (WINDOW objects also support the read-only DPISCALING property).

Further reading

If you want to find out more information on this topic please see the following link to Microsoft’s documentation on MSDN:

Writing High-DPI Win32 Applications

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

Subject to change…

Taskbar Integration – The TASKBARID property

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In a previous post on the RXI files we mentioned the taskBarID switch that could be applied when launching the Presentation Server to un-group instances of the same executable on the Windows Taskbar. This same principle can also be applied to top-level application windows so they can have their own icon on the taskbar rather than being grouped together with other application windows owned by the same instance.

To support this feature OpenInsight 10 provides a new WINDOW property called TASKBARID, which should contains a unique value that differentiates the window from other windows running on the desktop.

For example, a fairly easy way to set a unique value would be to combine the window ID and handle like so:

taskBarID = @window : "." : get_Property( @window, "HANDLE" )
call set_Property( @window, "TASKBARID", taskBarID )

Here is an example of a window with a blank TASKBAR property – notice that it is grouped with the System Monitor window as they both belong to the same instance of OpenInsight:

TASKBARID not set

Here is the same window with the TASKBARID set to “TEST” – the OpenInsight 10 window icon is now visible on the TaskBar:

TASKBARID set to “TEST”

Note that you can also give multiple windows the same TASKBARID if you wish to control how they are grouped together.

[Edit: 01 Feb 13 – property renamed to TASKBARID]

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

Special FX – The SHOW and HIDE methods

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These two new methods allow you to show or hide a form along with a simple fading or sliding animation. Each method takes a single parameter which specifies the type of animation to apply:

Effect Value	Description
-1 or null	Use the default effect value as set in the Form Designer
0	No effect
1	Fade Effect (cannot be used with MDI Child forms)
2	Slide Down
3	Slide Up
4	Slide Right
5	Slide Left
6	Slide Down and Right
7	Slide Down and Left
8	Slide Up and Right
9	Slide Up and Left

E.g. For a “pop-up toast” style notification dialog you could use the following effects:

exec_Method( @window, "SHOW", 3 ); Slide open from bottom to top
exec_Method( @window, "HIDE", 2 ); Slide closed from top to bottom

[Edit: 24 Apr 13 – Call_Method renamed to Exec_Method]

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

Special FX – The TRANSLUCENCY property

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This new property applies to all top-level windows and dialog boxes (but not MDI child windows) and allows you to set the translucency of a form based on a simple percentage amount, “0” being fully opaque and “100” being fully transparent.

Form with TRANSLUCENCY of 20

Form with a TRANSLUCENCY of 50

FORM with a TRANSLUCENCY of 80

Check out the excellent PAINT.NET application for a good example of using this effect where supporting modeless dialog boxes are rendered translucent when not active.

[Edit: 01 Feb 13 – property renamed to TRANSLUCENCY from TRANSPARENCY]

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

Special FX – Aero Glass

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One of the new capabilities added to OpenInsight 10 forms is Aero Glass support, a feature that Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista and unfortunately removed in Windows 8 (in the interests of disclosure your author is not a great fan of the “improvements” to the desktop in Windows 8). Still, Windows 7 remains extremely popular and will be around for many years to come so it makes sense to provide an Aero Glass interface for developers who wish to use it.

Aero Glass is exposed via the following properties:

GLASSMARGINS
GLASSFRAME
GLASSDRAG

The GLASSMARGINS property

This property is a simple @fm-delimited dynamic array of margin values that specify the areas on the form that should be rendered using the glass effect. Basically everything between the edge of a form and it’s appropriate margin value is rendered as glass.

<1> Left Margin
<2> Right Margin
<3> Top Margin
<4> Bottom Margin

Note that setting the margins to “-1” forces the entire client area of the form to be rendered as glass instead.

The GLASSFRAME property

This is a boolean property (1/0) that enables or disables the Aero Glass effect for a form. The GLASSMARGINS property must have been set before this property can be used to enable glass rendering.

The GLASSDRAG property

This is a boolean property (1/0) that specifies if the glass areas of a form can be used for dragging (normally only the form caption area can be used for this).

What happens when Aero Glass is not available?

Of course it’s entirely possible that your application may have to run in an environment where Aero Glass is not available, such as running under the Aero Basic theme or on Windows XP. In these circumstances the OS would “give up” and your form would be rendered with a normal client area like so:

As you can see there’s no hint of the glass margins, so this will probably make your glass-based UI layout unsatisfactory. In this case we’ve gone one step further and implemented a “Fake Glass” effect (much like Windows Explorer does under Aero Basic):

Fake Glass under Aero Basic

Fake Glass under Windows XP

Of course, as Microsoft removed Aero Glass in Windows 8 they actually supply their own replacement, which simply paints the solid frame colors into the “glass” margins like so:

Fake Glass under Windows 8

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

Building OpenInsight 10

News and notes from the bleeding edge of Revelation Software development

Tag Archives: WINDOW

The WRITEATRECORD property

Taskbar Integration – Progress Bars

PROGRESSVALUE Property

PROGRESSSTATE Property

Taskbar Integration – Overlay Icons

OVERLAYICON property

OpenInsight and High-DPI

Subject to change…

Taskbar Integration – The TASKBARID property

Special FX – The SHOW and HIDE methods

Special FX – The TRANSLUCENCY property

Special FX – Aero Glass

What happens when Aero Glass is not available?