Re: Forms 3 to version 6

From: Matt B. <mcb_at_fightspam.sd.znet.com>
Date: 2000/07/18
Message-ID: <sna41uoi1nk61_at_corp.supernews.com>#1/1


"Simong" <simong_at_explor.co.uk> wrote in message news:COVc5.268$Vc.152907_at_newsr2.u-net.net...
>Hi people
>
>Has anybody any experience of migrating forms 3 to forms version 6 and reports
 1.1 ? to reports 6?
>
>Any information would be really helpful.
>
>Thanks in anticipation.

We went from Forms 3 to Forms 5, plus we're continuing to generate and run the form in character mode (yuck!) on the UNIX box.

Forms 5 generated and in character mode doesn't want to play very nicely.

A few problems (some of these might only be a problem in character mode though):

  1. When landing in a field, the field's value is auto-selected. This is obvious to a user in a GUI environment, but not to a user in a character environment. It's rather disastrous on a long-ish field when the user starts typing away and the field's entire value gets wiped out. AFAIK, there's no switch for this and no workaround except for one that we figured out, but it's very convoluted and too complex to implement everywhere. Basically we found a way on PRE-TEXT-ITEM to create and start a timer, copy_region, clear_item, and (when the timer expires in a millisecond) paste_region back into the field and this will leave it unselected by the time control is reverted back to the user. However it also then messes with the record's status because the field was modified, so we had to code for that so it wasn't noticeable to the user that we did any smoke-and-mirrors magic. :-) Managing the record's status was a big pain, so we only implemented this in big fields where the autoselection was truly a major problem.
  2. Modal windows, with a certain property set (can't remember which property though) a certain way, produce an ugly window border in character mode. The upper left corner is "broken". If you do a query using the ampersand, the Query Where window is an example of this problem, which also carries over into our own programmed modal windows.
  3. Boilerplate text was a problem if you opened three or more forms at once. For example, Form A calls Form B (no hide), and Form B calls Form C (no hide). If Form C was narrower in appearance than Form B, exiting Form C back to Form B caused Form A's boilerplate text to disappear within the width previously occupied by Form C (kinda hard to explain). Usually Form A repainted fine again when you exited Form B, but for a while it looked really bad. Using prompts rather than boilerplate text solves this.
  4. Library calls sometimes got confused. There were occasions where we had local versions of procedures with the same name as a library procedure (had to override the library) and it would sometimes produce a ORA-06508 (I think that was the error - whatever one says "cannot find PL/SQL program unit") at runtime. We never could find a clear pattern to the problem though - not all forms with local procedures with the same names as library procedures had this problem. In addition, sometimes it was just an Oracle error but other times we'd actually get a PL/SQL runtime dump and even a core dump on occasion. We ended up removing the local program unit and actually modifying the library instead (unfortunately leaving the library with some hard-coded stuff in it based on the form name that called the procedure).
  5. We had a lot of problems with stacked canvases not displaying when they should and other times they displayed when they shouldn't. Not sure if this was a Forms issue or if one of our contractors just got too canvas-happy during the conversion though. If you can, minimize the number of canvases and windows as much as possible - makes a form much easier to manage.

Also familiarize yourself intimately with Forms 6 and try to think where your library can be improved. There are probably a zillion new features of Forms 6 (compared to Forms 3) that you can make use of in your library. Make beefing up the library a priority in the conversion and you'll be glad you took advantage of the various features.

-Matt Received on Tue Jul 18 2000 - 00:00:00 CEST

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