Any canvas colour you like - as long as it's black

I know I'm being rather optimistic here, but you never know, so here goes.

We have Forms 4.5 running on SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 and have written an application consisting of about 120 separate Forms in total, with some Forms using operating system #HOST commands to start up 'child' Forms and pass parameters to them.

There are three PCs involved, a SCO Database Server, a SCO Workstation which runs the Forms, and a WinNT4 machine which runs a NCD PC-Xware X-Server on which the Forms are displayed and user input captured.

This has all worked very succesfully - up to now!

The latest machines we have put together are significantly faster than those we have used in the past (now 667 MHz PIII with 128 MB memory as opposed to 120MHz PII with 64 MB memory) and also have more modern and faster ethernet network adapters.

The problem is that the canvas backgrounds on some of the forms now appears black, whereas before it appeared light grey, and means that the boilerplate text is not visible and the overall presentation is awful.

Many years ago we spent several weeks creating our own version of the $ORACLE_HOME\guicommon2\tk23\admin\Tk2Motif.rgb resource file that in conjunction with the .Xdefaults file governs the look of our forms, so as to closely resemble another set of applications we produce.

I have tried altering the resources in the Tk2Motif.rgb file to correct the problem, but this just results in other abnormalities such as light grey text on a light grey background in LOVs, which is rather less than useless.

The picture is confused by the fact that not all forms exhibit this problem, though most do, and we even have cases of different canvases within the same form behaving differently, one OK the other not.

Looking at how the forms are constructed by the f45runm runtime (using editres), I notice that each canvas is created as a series of four widgets, (canvas, drawn, canvas, drawn, or was it drawn, canvas, drawn, canvas). My suspicion is that the extra speed increase has somehow upset the timing of how these widgets are created, but have no way to confirm this.

Unfortunately, all support for Oracle products on SCO OpenServer ceased at the end of July this year, so I'm not expecting to get much help from Oracle support, and certainly won't get a bug fix if it hasn't already been done, though I will be contacting Oracle support to ask anyway. Moving off the SCO OpenServer platform is not something that we can easily undertake as there are other applications that both invoke and are invoked by the forms, and porting them would be non-trivial given their size and the time constraints we are under to deliver.

So the bottom line is for me to ask all you SCO OpenServer users out there whether any of you have encountered a similar problem, and if so, whether and how it was fixed.

I have searched the comp.databases.oracle.* newsgroups on Deja, the Oracle Technet site and the bugs and patches section of Oracle MetaLink, but all to no avail.

Any help would be VERY greatly appreciated.

Tony Matthews

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