Re: Oracle Forms 4.0 vs 4.5

Carol KIlner <kilnerc_at_basf-corp.com> writes:  

>Could anybody tell me the major differences between Oracle Forms 4.0
>and Oracle Forms 4.5
 

The two key improvements:  

1. The designer environment is significantly more convenient to work in. Property setting for items is done more like Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. A hierarchical Object Browser makes it much easier to find and manipulate the various components in a module.
2. The object reference feature now allows the source of the reference to be a module stored in the filesystem, rather than requiring it to be stored in the database. This makes the reference feature actually usable.

In conjunction with the improved reference feature, there are now Property Classes that can be defined (sort of like paragraph styles in a word processor) and then attached as a single group of properties to one or more items.  

We use the Property Classes and references features to define a base module that implements our style conventions for required fields, display-only fields, optional fields, hidden fields, etc. All other form modules reference these definitions from the base module.  

With this structure, we can change the color of all required fields, by making a single change in the base module, and then regenerating all other modules.    

The base module also defines standard form-level triggers that are picked up automatically by the other modules. Any changes to the base trigger code is picked up whenever the other modules are regenerated.  

The reference feature now allows Object Groups to be the source of the reference, so we can even ADD new form-level triggers to the base module, and all other modules pick them up, since they actually reference a group called STANDARD_TRIGGERS, for example.    

One more key improvement to triggers: Item-level triggers can be set to fire instead of, before, or after block-level triggers of the same name. (Similarly, block-level triggers can be instead of, before, or after form-level triggers.) This allows a more object-oriented containership "inheritance" architecture to be designed.    

If you only need to deploy to Microsoft Windows, I strongly suggest yoy upgrade from 4.0 to 4.5, based on personal experience.  

• Rick --

(Rick Rutt is a system architect living and working in Midland, Michigan.) Received on Thu Apr 06 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST