Re: OPO Classes

Chris -

>1. How do you maintain application standardization with forms? I
>haven't found a way to create a class based on a form.

You can't. You could have a class that is, in essence a form, and just drop an instance into a form, but there will probably be some issues with container boundaries (see next answer). If you just want to give a standard set of objects and functions to a form, you could write it to a file and read it from the file for a new form, or keep the form in a library, but, of course, you will not get any inheritance of future changes.

BTW, I will be writing an article on this topic for Oracle Informant in about three months.

>
>2. By creating/using a class based on a text box and assigning it a
>datasource do you essentially create another channel to a given table
>other than the channel for the datasource of the form?

I'm not sure about what you mean by a 'channel'. A class is a container, and containers have the properties of a form. You could make the RecordSource of a class "=container", which would automatically link the container/class to the same RecordSource as the form it is contained in.

However, this won't work with 1.04, because OPO automatically does a flush to the database whenever it crosses container boundaries, which is a bug. Let's say you add an instance of a class early in the form, before you have an entry for all the required fields. You will get a database error as soon as you tab out of the field.

Hopefully, this will be fixed in the enxt maintenance release.

• Rick Greenwald