General DF HMI & Scipt Questions/Ideas

[Davarius]

There are some questions/ideas that have popped up from my development experience in DF.

1) It would be nice to be able to change the title displayed on some pop-ups or at least omit a title all together.

When multi-purposing a page-popup or a "system."-popup the title is a nuisance to getting fancy with the overall appearance of things. Also, the underscore that shows up due to the naming convention for pages.

For example I could use the system.help function to do a lot of custom things given that it has browser capabilities but would like to be able to leave out the title "help" on the window or at least change the name displayed.

2) There are ways to shut down DF or reboot from sequence, is there a way to exit full screen?

Some users get themselves into full screen mode and cant get back out or get frantic if they cant

see the comforting Windows Taskbar or desktop.

3) You can read key strokes in DF, can you pass them?

4) Any useful windows functionality that you can use in the shell execute function? I saw in one

post that some one found a way to force close DF. Just wondering if there is somewhere to find out other things to put in there.

5) For the local sequences running in components it would be cool if the name of the component could be

accessed (not necessarily changed if it would cause problems).

I think it would be useful when sending messages between components or doing generic versions of script within component functions and dynamic coding. I have done general scripts using component position as a unique identifier (when sending a message), but a name would be better because you could duplicate and use a number.

These are all just question I have had for a while and just compiled into one general post rather than posting separately.

[AzeoTech]

Good questions and we'll look into implementing a few of your suggestions. Here's a quick response to some of them:

1) For page popup's, you can always just rename the pages. You don't have to use _ in your names, you just can't use space. We'll look into specifying the name in the function call (for help as well)

2) I don't think so, but we can look to adding a little system. function for it.

3) That would be what is called a keyboard wedge, and that is a very different beast. What are you trying to do?

4) shellexecute() can do anything you can type at the command prompt, so just search the internet for whatever you are trying to do. One site I found handy was this one: http://dx21.com/coding/libraries/rundll32/default.aspx Its a list of windows tasks you can perform by calling the RunDLL32 windows library. I use it to automatically hibernate my machine after running backups (which are run out of a batch file).

5) Again, we'll look to adding this.

[Davarius]

That would be great, is it something to look forward to in 6 or would some of the changes be something that could happen in upcoming revs?

The reason for the question on passing key strokes was simply a means to an end to get out of full screen.

No need for it if there is a system function to do so.

Thanks

[AzeoTech]

It would be in future short revs, possibly the next one.