Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Advanced Development

Advanced User Interface Design in Progress Dynamics

A typical Progress Dynamics application has windows with many objects on them, including toolbars with a variety of buttons and menus, and multi-page tab folders with interrelationships between the objects on different pages. The relationships between the objects are determined by SmartLinks™, by properties, and by various functions that control the interactions. Progress Dynamics has many features that support building complex windows and customizing behavior to suit the needs of your application. This chapter describes some of those features and the techniques you can use to take advantage of them.

This chapter describes a single folder window that illustrates many of these features. It is a multi-page window called oemaintwin (for Order Entry Maintenance window), designed to display and update Customer, Order, and OrderLine records in the Sports2000 database. You can assemble the window yourself to follow along with the various examples in the chapter. In describing the window, we presume that you have created a Sports product with an OE product module for Order Entry, done an Entity Import of at least the Customer, Order, OrderLine, Item, and SalesRep tables, and used the Object Generator to create a suite of dynamic objects (SDOs, DataFields, viewers, and browsers) for those tables in the OE product module. See OpenEdge Development: Progress Dynamics Basic Development for guidance on any of these preparatory steps, and also for detailed information on using the Container Builder. To create the window, start with a dynamic independent window (DynObjc), referred to as independent because the window does not expect to receive a key value from another window when it starts up. In general, all the objects you use to create the window can be dynamic objects unless otherwise noted.

The following sections describe how to assemble the pieces of the window and how the window illustrates some of the chapter’s material on user interface design:

Advanced support for object links
Modifying visual properties at the master and instance levels
Disabling and hiding buttons and menu items
Defining action rules for menu and toolbar items