Progress
AppBuilder
Developer’s Guide


Special Pages

Three page designations have special meaning within the paging system:

These page designations are discussed individually in the following subsections.

Design Page

When you place SmartObjects into a Design Window workspace, you are placing them on the current Design Page, whatever that might be at the time. The current Design Page setting appears in the status bar of the AppBuilder main window, and is meaningful only for placing SmartObjects. The default Design Page is always Page 0. An ADM page may have any unique, non-negative integer as its identifier.

AppBuilder places basic 4GL and ActiveX objects on Page 0, regardless of the Design Page setting. Only SmartObjects may reside on pages other than Page 0. You may be able to work around this limitation by placing such non-Smart objects in a SmartFrame, and then placing the SmartFrame on the page of your choice.

As the name suggests, the Design Page setting is relevant only in design mode. It is not meaningful at run time, and is ignored.

To make a different page the Design Page, follow these steps:

  1. Open the dialog box using one of these methods:
    • Double-click on the Page Number field in the AppBuilder main window.
    • Choose Edit Goto Page.
    • Open the Procedure Settings dialog box (Tools Procedure Settings), choose the Pages button, and finally choose the Design button in the Pages dialog box.
  2. Enter the number of the new Design Page. If that page does not exist, AppBuilder creates it immediately.
NOTE: Remember that although you can change the Design Page, the change only affects SmartObjects. When you place other objects, including ActiveX objects, you are placing them on Page 0 regardless of the Design Page setting.

To see the contents of all pages at once, change the Design Page value to a question mark (?). You can then align objects that reside on different pages so that page-changes appear neater and more orderly. All else being equal, users perceive neatness to indicate higher quality.

Page 0 (Zero)

Page 0 is the default page in every SmartContainer. If you create a SmartContainer and add objects to it without changing any of the paging settings, then all of the objects will be on Page 0.

Page 0 objects are always displayed. If you have some objects assigned to Page 0, some assigned to Page 1, and some assigned to Page 2, the possibilities for display will be: Page 0 objects only; Page 0 objects + Page 1 objects; Page 0 objects + Page 2 objects. Unless you write special code to handle the situation, you cannot exclude Page 0 objects when displaying objects on other pages.

Startup Page

You can choose to designate one page, in addition to Page 0, to be displayed when the SmartContainer starts up. This is called the Startup Page.

Page 0 is the default Startup Page. Unless you explicitly specify a nonzero page number as the Startup Page, only the objects placed on Page 0 will display when you run the SmartContainer.

For example, if you use a SmartFolder to organize the viewing and hiding of pages, you typically designate Page 1 (which always corresponds to the leftmost folder tab) as the Startup Page. If you leave the Startup page set to Page 0 when you use a SmartFolder, then the SmartObjects in the folder will not appear when the application starts up.

You set the Startup Page in the Pages dialog box, which you invoke from the Procedure Settings dialog box.


Copyright © 2004 Progress Software Corporation
www.progress.com
Voice: (781) 280-4000
Fax: (781) 280-4095