andy@tasha (12/16/88)
My company has been using INFORMIX SQL for a database application we
produce. Unfortunately, I am not pleased with INFORMIX's rather primitive
user interface, i.e their forms and menu system.
Therefore, I am looking for independent vendor products that replace
INFORMIX's forms and menu system. Some of the features I would like
to see are:
- ability to use color in forms
- pop up windows in forms
- pop up help menus
- pull down menus
- scrolling lists in forms
I am not interested in products that simplify development, only products
that have better user interface capabilities.
We have an old release of INFORMIX 4GL (ver. 1.00.05C) but I don't think
it is much of an improvement over SQL with respect to the user interface.
Do the more recent releases of INFORMIX 4GL have some of the above
features?
We use AT&T 3B2 computers (400s and 600s) and the AT&T 6386. I am
be particularly interested in any products that use windowing on the
6386.
Thanks in advance,
Andrew Warinner Global Information Systems Technology, Inc.
1800 Woodfield Drive, Savoy, IL 61874
(217) 352-1165
INTERNET: flint%gistdev@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
UUCP: {uunet,pur-ee,convex}!uiucuxc!gistdev!flintdan@speedy.wisc.edu (Dan Frank) (12/17/88)
In article <7600001@tasha> andy@tasha writes: >I am looking for independent vendor products that replace >INFORMIX's forms and menu system. We have the latest release of the Informix 4GL for the IBM PC under MS-DOS. It has most or all of what you want: >Some of the features I would like >to see are: > > - ability to use color in forms Color attributes of individual fields are controllable. All prompts, line drawing characters, etc. must be of the same color. > - pop up windows in forms The 4GL has windows. You can pop up a window in the middle of a form, and when you close it the windows underneath will be redrawn. You may bring a window to the top. This appears to be curses-based, and is s-l-o-w on the PC, but not so you'd really hate it. > - pop up help menus Help isn't "pop-up" unless you put it in a window of its, own, but you can associate help with individual bounce-bar menu items. > - pull down menus I don't think so, at least in the Mac sense. You could pop up a menu in a window, but that's a different animal, with a different feel to it. > - scrolling lists in forms Absolutely. You can do data entry in scrolling lists, insert and delete members, have code called when you enter or leave any field, etc. The one hole it appears to have is that the object being scrolled is an array, not a scroll cursor, and they haven't been able to tell me if there is some "end of array" event I can trap to load up more rows from the database. Hope this helps. We like the 4GL a lot. We've found it to have some bugs and limitations, but it does most of what we need in terms of user interface sophistication. -- Dan