Category Archives: Clarion.Net

Improvements to the PropertyGrid

There has been a lot of talk about the transition from properties presented in modal dialogs (ala C6 and prior versions) and properties presented in the .Net PropertyGrid control.  And a lot of that talk was not too complimentary to the MS PropertyGrid.  There were several different complaints about the control, and perhaps the most frequent complaint was the poor support for keyboard-only navigation and data entry. There were other problems too, like the representation of True/False values, etc.

Clarion 7.1 addresses these issues with a much more keyboard-capable grid control, we are still working on further improvements but here is a very short video (no audio) that gives you a good idea of where its headed.  Just keep an eye on the mouse and you’ll see its not used at all for navigating and editing the grid data.

Report Writer


This Friday we’re going to demonstrate the new Report Writer on Clarion Live!. Our thanks to John Hickey and Arnold Young for inviting us back!
I thought I’d take a few minutes to point out some of the features and give you a feel for the UI.  Here’s a scaled-down screen shot of the main view.

Report Writer - main view
Report Writer – main view

Everything is done from this main view, in this next shot I had just pressed the “Preview” button.

Preview the Report

As you can see, when you go into Preview mode a new toolbar appears that provides some great functionality, including the ability to search the report, save the report to a number of formats and even email the report in your desired format.

search1

There are some great options for saving the report to disk or for emailing.  The email button invokes the client
machine’s default email program.

export formats

Back into Design mode, one feature I think you’ll love is the support for “Styles”.  Styles let you define background colors, borders, fonts and text alignment which then makes its very easy to quickly set all your fields or static text to a nice uniform look.

styles

Styles can also be applied to Report Bands, for example that’s how I gave this report the the two different shades of blue for the odd and even rows.

styles2

The Group and Sort Pad makes it easy to apply grouping/sorting to any report.  Grouping and Sorting can be done by an end user with just a few mouse clicks.

groupsort

There are 17 controls available to build your report with:

toolbox1

The Report Wizard does a great job of getting you started, it allows you to select both a style (which you can customize), and a layout.

rptstyle2

layout1

And there is builtin support for creating labels:

labels

Hopefully this post gives you a good idea of what’s coming.  We’re working hard now on TXR conversions, which many Clarion developers have told us is very important to them, and we’re fixing bugs found internally, but it won’t be long before we make a beta version available.

Its worth mentioning that the new Report Writer will be shared by both Clarion 7 (win32) and Clarion.Net, and it includes support for doing advanced scripting using Clarion# at design time.  There is much more functionality, and great features to talk about, and as the documentation progresses we’ll post a detailed spec sheet on the web site.