It is beyond the scope of this online help to provide detailed documentation of the numerous controls available in the Visual Designer and their properties. You can view the vendor-supplied help for a specific control by placing an instance of the control on the Design Canvas, selecting it, and pressing F1. In addition, you can use the following techniques to get useful information about the controls:
Toolbox tool tips
Point the cursor at a control name in the Toolbox to display a description of the control's function in a tool tip.
Properties view help text
With an instance of the control selected on the Design Canvas, select any property or event in the Properties view to display a description of its function at the bottom of the window.
Class Browser
The OpenEdge Class Browser gives you access to extensive information about the structure and content of all ABL and .NET resources, packages or namespaces, and types on your system. This information typically includes summary information about the object. It also includes details about class membership, inheritance, and interface implementation, and gives sample ABL syntax for working with the USING and DEFINE statements.
To navigate quickly to the Class Browser entry for a given object type:
1. Place an instance of the object on the Design Canvas and select it.
2. In the field at the top of the Properties view, note the name of the class from which the object is derived. The class name is the string to the right of the colon (:) that follows the instance name. Enter this class name in the Search field in the Class Browser and click
to execute the search. The result list appears in the left pane of the Class Browser; in this list, select the entry that exactly matches the class name you searched for, and view the available information in the panes to the right.
For example, if you place a single SplitContainer control on the Design Canvas, by default the control instance is named splitContainer1. When you select the control, the Properties view shows its name and class thus:
Therefore, to search for the class, enter System.Windows.Forms.SplitContainer in the Class Browser Search field.
You may find it handy to copy the class name from the corresponding DEFINE VARIABLE statement in the ABL source code and paste it into the Class Browser search. Copy the string between AS and NO-UNDO. For the preceding example, the variable declaration is:
DEFINE PRIVATE VARIABLE splitContainer1 AS System.Windows.Forms.SplitContainer NO-UNDO.
to execute the search. The result list appears in the left pane of the Class Browser; in this list, select the entry that exactly matches the class name you searched for, and view the available information in the panes to the right.