SRP Controls – When Methods are Better than Properties
As any developer knows, end users are often teaching us programmers a few things from time to time. They instruct us to better understand their work flow. They point out flaws in our assumptions, especially regarding what we think is easy to use. They also help to expose gaps in our documentation.
Such became the case in a recent discussion forum thread involving the SRP Schedule control. In this case, the end user (i.e., a developer programming the control) found out that she could crash OpenInsight or produce some interesting visual anomalies through the repeated use of the TimeBlockList property. This certainly revealed a bug within the SRP Schedule control’s inner workings which we were quick to fix. However, it begged an important question: why had this gone unnoticed before, especially during our own internal testing?
Looking Forward to RevCon2015
Over two years ago the Revelation community was given an opportunity to see first hand how OpenInsight 10, perhaps the most significant release in over a decade, was going to be transformed in many significant ways. From the regular Carl Pates’ blog, to the 2013 User’s Conference, and the various road shows, one thing had been made clear: OpenInsight 10 will be more than a few new tools and enhancements to the core product. By any metric this release will be a complete rewrite with significant impact on future OpenInsight applications.
There is no wonder that the 2015 Revelation User’s Conference will be dedicated to showcasing OpenInsight 10. In previous conferences there was always a fair amount of presentations highlighting new features of the current release but the bulk covered a wide variety of topics, including beginning to advanced courses, practical techniques, and highly technical demonstrations from both Revelation Software staff and many community experts (including SRP).
SRP Editor 2.6.2 Released
SRP is pleased to announce the release of SRP Editor 2.6.2. This release crushes several lingering bugs and offers some enhancements as well.
We developers have been known to rename a stored procedure from time to time. Most of us know that the name of the stored procedure as it appears within the source code determines the object code name. For example, your procedure name is TEST but you save it as MY_TEST. When you compile, the program will be stored as TEST and any attempt to call MY_TEST will result in a run time error. We decided it doesn’t make sense to ever have a mismatch between the name of the stored procedure in code and it’s source code repository ID. As of this version, when you change the name of a stored procedure in code, you will be prompted with the Save As dialog pre-populated with the new name. This should reduce unwanted errors and confusion.
Another handy feature is the new Find option in the context menu. You are used to highlighting text, pressing Ctrl+F3 to open the Find dialog, and then clicking the Find Next button. Now, you can right click on any word (or selection) and choose the Find option to immediately jump to the next instance of that text. This will make that text the active search, which means you can follow it up with the F3 (Find Next ) and F4 (Find Previous) keys. We think this minor convenience will accumulate into big time savings over the long term.
SRP ActiveX Controls 3.1.3 Released
A short post for today, we have officially released SRP Controls version 3.1.3. While this version does not contain major enhancements we did knock out a bunch of bugs that have been reported to us on the SRP Forums.
The SRP ReportTable Control did get a couple new features we want to make you aware of. You can now modify how grid lines are rendered using the HorizontalGridStyle and VerticalGridStyle properties. For those wanting more control over check boxes, see the new CheckAll and UncheckAll methods.
For a complete list of bug fixes and changes, please visit the SRP Controls version history on the SRP Wiki. Also stay tuned to the SRP Blog as we have a few major announcements coming down the pipe.
SRP Sketch Control
You may have seen the SRP Sketch Control in the wiki only to be disappointed that it was not documented. There was a good reason for that: we weren’t finished with it. This was a control originally built for a specific industry in mind and we needed to work it into a general control with more options. We are proud to officially release the control to our customers, fully documented of course. Continue reading
Less is More – Using User Defined Conversions
We are filing this under “things we thought everyone knew but apparently not!” While engaged in a recent project that had us upgrading an application from OpenInsight 8.0.1 to OpenInsight 9.4.0, we came across a curious technique that allowed end users to see meaningful information in the form but the underlying data was a single letter code. To control the available options, the original developer used a drop down list style combo box control, e.g.:
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SRP ActiveX Controls 3.1.1 Released
It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally posted an new release of SRP ActiveX Controls. For customers with a Pro license (those using SRPControls.ocx), the new release number is 3.1.1. For those of you with individual control licenses, note that each OCX file has it’s own version number. Visit our download page to compare version numbers with your own to make sure you’re up to date.
Here is a breakdown of what has changed. Only significant features are mentioned. For a complete list of improvements, including bug fixes, see the SRP ActiveX Controls version history.
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