PROIV Version 6 Presentation Enhancements

PROIV Version 6 introduces many new presentation enhancements to enable you to create better looking and easier to use applications.

Programmable menus and toolbars
PROIV Version 6 allows developers to define their own menus and toolbars. This is achieved by using new PROIV control bar and action control objects. These are high-level objects (like functions, global logics, file definitions, tasks) and have their own maintenance suite in PROIV Developer.

An action control is an object that can be rendered as a button or a menu option at runtime. A control bar is a collection of action controls and can be rendered at runtime as a toolbar, drop-down menu or right-click menu.

Drop-down menus

Drop-down menus are owned by either the PROIV Client or the active window. They persist for the life of the cycle, function or application. The action controls in the menu can have their own child drop-down menu, allowing cascading menu structures to be built similar to the example shown below.

Old style (pre-Version 6) drop-down menus will be automatically migrated to the new drop-down menus as part of the PROIV Version 6 upgrade.

Right click menus

Right click menus can be assigned to entry fields. As with drop down menus, they can also have their own children drop-down menus.

Toolbars

Toolbars are owned by either the PROIV Client or the active window. Client toolbars can persist for the life of the cycle, function or application; Window toolbars only persist for the life of the Window. Other toolbar properties that can be set include the sizes of the buttons and images, and whether the toolbar is docked or floating.

Action controls

The action controls in menus and toolbars can be simple buttons, check buttons or separators, and may include graphics, tooltips and hotkeys.

When an action control is selected it can:

Call a Function
Call a Global Function
Action a Logic
Action a Global Logic
Trigger a standard Windows action (e.g. cut, copy, paste)
Open a help file at a specific topic
Raise a function key event

All control bars that are not hidden will be rendered at runtime (with the exception of right-click menus). They can also be controlled from logic and can be hidden, shown, enabled, disabled, and have their caption and tool tip properties set.

Programmable client icon and title

Previously in PROIV the client icon and title were customisable by changing an .ini or registry setting. PROIV Version 6 makes it possible for these to be overridden from logic by setting client properties:

CLIENT.ApplicationIcon - the icon to be used in the top left of the PROIV Client
CLIENT.ApplicationTitle – the application title on the title bar of the PROIV Client.

Programmable mouse busy pointer

PROIV Version 6 allows the developer to control the Windows mouse busy pointer from within logic, so that users can see when the system is busy. When the PROIV Client is waiting for the PROIV Virtual Machine it will use the current default Windows busy pointer -usually an hourglass - or alternatively the developer may set it to another .cur or .ani file. Whilst the system is busy, the PROIV Client will block sending any further events to the PROIV Virtual Machine.

Client auto fit to font

The PROIV Version 6 Client will allow automatic fit to font. When enabled the main client window and any child windows will automatically resize when the user presses the up or down font size buttons.

ActiveX design time properties

Previously in PROIV it has not been possible to change the design time properties of ActiveX components during development of a function. With PROIV Version 6 it is now possible to change these design time properties. This allows the developer more flexibility to tailor their application to enable or disable functionality and change features such as font, colour and appearance of ActiveX objects at run time.

Multi-lingual

PROIV Version 6 incorporates enhanced multi-lingual features - see the PROIV Multi-Lingual Briefing Paper. One element of this is to hold alternative language translations for each existing literal. However, if the new string is larger than the available space PROIV will use an ellipsis at the end of the literal to indicate that truncation has occurred. Hovering over the truncated phrase with the mouse will reveal a tooltip displaying the full literal.

Client Session Manager

PROIV Version 6 introduces a new Client Session Manager that allows multiple instances of the PROIV Client to be run in the same frame. New clients can be started, positioned and sized programmatically, with parameters passed to these new clients at start-up. See the PROIV Client Session Manager Briefing Paper.

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