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Introducing the ABL GUI Designer : Concepts : Benefits and limitations of GUI Designer
 

Benefits and limitations of GUI Designer

There are certain benefits and limitations of GUI Designer (AppBuilder in Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge environment) over standalone AppBuilder, which are as follows:
*The GUI Designer project properties are changed as part of the integration. The GUI Designer project properties are stored as OpenEdge project properties. Some of the .ini or registry settings that are used by standalone AppBuilder is ignored when running in Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge (Developer Studio). See GUI Designer project properties.
*The GUI Designer preferences are changed as part of the integration. The GUI Designer preferences are stored as OpenEdge preferences and are workspace level settings. The .ini or registry settings that are used by standalone AppBuilder are ignored when running in OpenEdge. See AppBuilder preferences.
Note: The Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge stores the GUI Designer preferences settings in Eclipse preference store, and sends these settings to standalone AppBuilder to synchronize the preferences settings.
*You can open multiple GUI Designer procedure file (.w) windows. See Working with ABL procedure files.
*Cue Cards appear as a view in AppBuilder perspective in Developer Studio. In standalone AppBuilder, you can control the display of Cue Cards from the Preferences page. See ABL Cue Cards view.
*Recent Messages feature is not available with GUI Designer in Developer Studio. You can access this feature from the Help menu in the standalone AppBuilder.
*The Toggle on/off to change window on-top setting option on the Dynamic Properties window does not work in Developer Studio environment. This option only works when the Dynamics Properties window is opened in the standalone AppBuilder environment.
Note: The Dynamic Properties window opens and runs in a window outside of the Progress Developer Studio Eclipse framework. Online help is available from the utility's Help button or F1 key
*Non Visual AppBuilder files, including Web Objects such as HTML Mapping objects will open in the ABL UI Designer in the same tree view and have the same behavior as in standalone AppBuilder, with the exception that clicking on the Code Section nodes is procedure/function nodes. There is no wizard support to create AppBuilder web objects in Developer Studio.