There was much gnashing of teeth over the fact that the plain Embed Editor didn’t implement Code Completion – well now the next 7.1.x update implements Code Completion in the Embed Editor. We are also looking at adding the support for Code Folding, which as of today isn’t supported in the Embed Editor, and Clarion devs have asked that we also provide code folding for Control Statements such as IF, CASE, LOOP, etc. and we’re looking into this too.

In case you haven’t found this yet, you can define your own “folding regions” anywhere you like with this syntax:

!region SomeDescriptiveText
…….source code
!endregion

Check the Help file index for this topic: “Regions – Source Code” or just give it a try with the above syntax.

Small adjustment to the release plan; we targeted the 7.1 release for today 12/18, but yesterday we fixed two bugs in the window library and the QA team requires 2 full days to redo the regression test suite. We realize there are a lot of folks very eager to get their hands on the new release, and rather then make you wait until late Monday or possibly Tuesday, we’re making 7.1 available today to all subscription holders as a “pre-release”. If no regressions are found the pre-release will in fact become the official release.

Another good reason for letting the release out today; all 3rd party blackbox products must be rebuilt with the 7.1 compiler, so this pre-release will give those vendors a headstart on doing so.

In another post I received a comment about this item in the release notes; “CHANGE: FILEs declared within a Procedure are now Private data to that Procedure”, and I promised to provide some further details about that change.

The linker has been improved in 7.1, whereas in every prior release going back to earliest Clarion compiler/linker, reporting of “duplicate symbol” by the linker was dependent upon the order of files in the link list. Meaning that the absence of “duplicate symbol” errors did not necessarily mean that all was OK. When this problem was exposed and fixed, it immediately uncovered two previously “hidden” problems in some of the libsrc code we ship, and exposed some problems in 3rd party products used in our regression testing, and we do expect that a few of you will find your own “hidden” problems when you rebuild with 7.1.

How about an example of the type of problem the 7.1 linker will now catch? OK.  Assume that there are 2 very different procedures but with the exact same public name in 2 different Member modules. Nothing can be done by the linker to allow them both, but the old linker could miss that error dependent upon the order of source files and presence of resource files in the link list. The solution for this type of error is easy, one of the procedures can be renamed, or the PRIVATE attribute could be added to their prototypes. In general, it’s better to use the PRIVATE attribute for all procedures and data objects local to a member module, unless they are exported or used in other modules.  If you do run into an unexpected duplicate symbol error, don’t panic, its easy to fix and will make for a better product.

We’ve taken your suggestions and your feature requests and delivered on them with 7.1; from the ultra-small things like changing toolbar icons, to the big things like the new functionality in the property grid, the new window previewer, automatic App saving and recovery functionality, Windows 7 manifest support in the linker/templates, a new Report Writer, ….. well its a very long list of improvements which I won’t repeat right now.

7.1 is a fantastic update; more reliable, more stable, and more fully-featured then any other Clarion release, and we’re sure you’ll love it.

The day before Thanksgiving I posted about the upcoming release of 7.1 (and the next update for Clarion.Net), and I wrote that we expected to make it within 2 weeks.  In that same post I mentioned we’d be closed for a long (for us) 4 day break over the holiday.  Well it seems some people took that 2 weeks literally to mean 14 consecutive days, and not the next 2 working weeks. Ahem, even our developers take a day off now and then… 🙂

We are in final closedown for the 7.1 release, we planned to have it ready by this Friday (and that would be within the 2 working weeks!), but there is a chance it’ll have to go out on the following week. Why?  Well there were a few “hot topics” brought to our attention last week and we decided to tackle 2 of them. So if you don’t get a notification of the 7.1 release this Friday, just relax over the weekend and look forward to getting 7.1 early next week. The same applies for the Clarion.Net release!

Here is what we’ve been working on these last 2 weeks, and indeed some of these items did consume a bit of extra time (the first 2 items were the “hot topics” I was referring to)

WORKAROUND: The OS could position some Menu items outside the screen boundary if there were sufficient number of items to cause a multi-column overflow
FEATURE: You can now set if the Copy Referenced Dlls to Output Directory defaults to On or Off via the Tools/Options/Clarion/General tab
FEATURE: The PRIVATE attribute is now allowed for TYPE declarations

CHANGE:  Better error message when an included project cannot be found during a make
CHANGE:  When you associate the C7 IDE with .app files, the .app files now get an appropriate icon displayed in Windows
CHANGE: FILEs declared within a Procedure are now Private data to that Procedure
CHANGE: Menu style now takes into account dimensions of particular item defined in MENU/MENUBAR declaration or set at run time (in latter case PROP:NoWidth and/or PROP:NoHeight must be set to FALSE)
CHANGE: Post a warning if window/report parser changed some control definition because a variable used as a attribute’s parameter does not exist anymore
CHANGE: Warning if PRIVATE and PROTECTED are used incorrectly
CHANGE: private queue types in abfile.clw are now marked private to take advantage of the updated clw compiler and reduce the number of duplicate symbols possible
CHANGE: renamed internal class used in the Query control QEIPManager to QueryQEIPManager because it was duplicated with the public method with the same name.

FIX:  %ApplicationExternalLibrary was returning the wrong value if you edited the project properties of an app, but did not set the model (ie left it at the default value of dll)
FIX:  An exception would be thrown by the data pad if you copied a field and then tried to paste it into an empty local data list
FIX:  Not all compilers were registered if you created a new C6 version
FIX:  The Data pad could throw an exception if you tried to add a Queue to local data
FIX: Aboop.tpw: Incorrect declaration of a variable for the return value was generated if the procedure return type in the prototype was ? or *?
FIX: Avoid auto-#RELEASE on emitting unconditional source lines
FIX: Setting of PROP:NoHeight and PROP:NoWidth properties for menu items worked not as documented.
FIX: Source Editor – Search/Replace would fail for various conditions
FIX: The ISAM file imports would not work if you had a file with a . in the name.

PTSS 32051: Suppress Windows internal repainting of the button upon changing its text
PTSS 33701: Clarioncl would some times fail to register templates if multiple /tr switches where supplied on the command line
PTSS 33804: Lookup table must be updated first before record validation
PTSS 34190: GROUP and OPTION controls cannot be selected themselves but they provide defaults for selected text and background colors to nested controls
PTSS 34226: Current build configuration was not being passed so the %ApplicationDebug symbol was not setup correctly
PTSS 34563: Show warning if WINDOW with TOOLBOX/DOCK/DOCKED attributes has the MDI attribute too
PTSS 34600: Changing of variable name in the Data Pad was not reflected in changes to attributes of WINDOW/REPORT controls using that variable as a parameter
PTSS 34605: The window previewer would not work with ENTRY controls that had @P or @K pictures
PTSS 34631: Designers might not be available in plain embed editor
PTSS 34643: Implementation of drawing of themed borders for RTF controls

Three new properties:

PROP:TextLeftMargin and PROP:TextRightMargin

The PROP:TextLeftMargin, PROP:TextRightMargin properties get or set the value of left and right margins for text in ENTRY, SPIN, COMBO, TEXT, RTF controls and in drop-down LIST controls.  The problem we had was that the old (pre-C7) fixed margin of 2 pixels wasn’t always correct for some of the newer fonts and font sizes.  The original C7 implementation calculated margin values based upon the control’s type, its font, and where the control is placed; in a WINDOW or REPORT, and some additional aspects.  However the new default margins could be incorrect in some specific situations like one which was described in the PTSS where large font sizes were not displayed correctly in a Entry control.  These two new properties allow you to justify margins in all cases, and they allow you to set different values for the left and right margins.

Syntax:

?control {PROP:TextLeftMargin} = n
?control {PROP:TextRightMargin} = n

Where, n is an integer constant or expression greater or equal to 0.  It sets the margin using the current units of the WINDOW or REPORT that owns the the control.
Negative values are treated as follows:
a value of -1 : the RTL uses the Windows default margin value which is dependent upon the control’s font
for all other negative values :  the RTL uses the C7 default margin value which is very close to Windows default value but takes into account some additional aspects such as the control type

PROP:LastChanceHook

This is a new write-only SYSTEM property which allows you to specify the hook function invoked if an exception has occurred. The hook function allows you to display
information about the exception and choose an action:

• continue execution of the thread where exception occurred (if the exception isn’t fatal)
• stop the thread (or entire process if the exception occurred in the main process thread) without invoking the RTL exception handler
• execute the RTL exception handler

The RTL exception handler allows you to show information about the exception and asks for an action, possible actions:

• stop the thread where exception occurred
• stop the entire process
• invoke the system debugger
• generate a debug event if the program is already running under debugger

The implementation provides a far more intelligent way for handling program termination in case of some abnormal behavior then the existing ‘Do you want to GPF?” message.  It also allows you to set the exit code (error level) returned by the program to the OS upon program termination without the necessity to terminate the program immediately.

Summary; this allows end users to avoid having to terminate an entire program if some error occurred in one of its threads.

In the effort to theme and polish the appearance of all UI elements for 7.0 the Tooltip was missed, but for the 7.1 release Tooltips now get the OS style as
shown in this screenshot taken from Windows 7.