[comp.os.vms] SMG Forms

TBLAKE@BINGVAXA.BITNET (Thomas_R._Blake) (07/29/87)

>  And here's my question of the day:
>   I'm writing a database type program which has to change data and the
>users would like to see "forms" that they can fill in on the screen as
>opposed to some sort of line by line typing thing.
>   As I go thru the SMG routines in the programming support manual, I
>see lots of warnings about smg$read_composed_line and smg$read_string
>only working if the virtual display is pasted to the first column and
>there is nothing to its right.
>   Obviously, these aren't made to fill in forms..  What call should I
>use?  I'm working with strings, reals, and integers from VAX Fortran and
>writing an indexed file from the data. (That's not terribly useful to
>you, but I'm trying to straighten my head out..)
>
>   Any suggestions folks?

        When put in a similar situation, I decided that the SMG routines
didn't serve my purposes, so I wrote some Pascal routines for field entry.
This is not an offer to ship these routines all over the world, they were,
(dare I say it), hack code, and I'm want to re-write them propperly before
other people read them.

        In any case, I used QIOW for key input, and worte the characters
on the screen, and moved about the cursor using SMG routines, so that the
application could be used on different sorts of terminals.

                                                Thomas R. Blake
                                                A Hack Programmer
                                                        (When Forced)