Causeway for Dyalog 8.2 requires an interpreter dated October 7th 1999 or later to function completely correctly. Most of the new classes will operate on any interpreter build after June 1999, but the Calendar should not be used on earlier builds.

Additions and Updates for Dyalog 8.2
The vertical and horizontal splitter bars have been converted to use new ‘Splitter’ object. This greatly simplifies the classes, and the visual behaviour is much cleaner. There is no change to the way the class is used, so existing application code will run as before.

Support for the new ToolControl and ToolButton objects. These add a surprising amount of complexity to application design, as the user can change their configuration quite dramatically by dragging the toolbars around, setting captions on or off, or hiding and showing selected toolbars. Causeway treats toolbars (and status bars) as one-sided splitter bars, and will automatically move or resize any other objects which are affected when the bar changes size. It also allows you to set and track the sequence of the toolbars, as well as the newline property of each – this is essential if you intend to store this information in the registry so that you can rebuild the screen ‘as the user left it’ when next the application starts.

Simple support for the Calendar object. Adds a calendar to your form, using the same ordinal date as in the Date class, with the optional adjustment for Excel dates.

Accelerator Key Support
A set of new functions to help you keep track of accelerator keys, typically used on menus and tool buttons:

• #.CPro.ListAccelerators fm – returns a vector of accelerator keys (in standard format SHIFT+CTRL+D) to allow for checking or review. “fm” may be null, in which case all current accelerators are listed.
• {fm} #.CPro.IsAccelFree ‘Ctrl+X’ – returns a boolean scalar indicating if that keycode in in use by the application. If {fm} is omitted, all forms are checked. Either the text form or the numeric keycode may be passed as argument.
• {fm} #.CPro.RunAccel key – simulates the user pressing the given key combination, either as ‘Ctrl+Space’ or 32 0. Returns a shy boolean which is 1 if the key combination was logged in the table of currently used keys. If {fm} is omitted, the first hit in the table is run; applications must not rely on this!

New Picture-strip Editor
A simple bitmap editing tool to assist in creating the artwork for imagelists (tree and listcontrols) and tool buttons. This allows you to review each bitmap in the context of its neighbours in the strip, to reshuffle the list easily, and to grab any or all of the standard Windows tool buttons to use for standard actions like Copy, Paste etc.

Designer Improvements
The Designer now allows bulk update of properties common to all selected objects. Use with care – it is possible to remove styles by selecting a collection of objects with incompatible style lists! However it is so useful to be able to set ‘Caption at side’ etc. that this is left open.

Copy and paste of properties is now allowed. Use the right- button menu on any object to ‘clipboard’ any subset of non-default properties. These may be pasted into a single object from its own menu, or if several objects are selected, use the Edit submenu from the form to paste the (valid) properties into all of them.

Extended support for class-specific functions – property types ‘string’ and ‘stringlist’ (and their synonyms) can invoke a specific service function from the ‘drilldown’ button shown at the right of the edit field in the designer.

The ‘menu’ key in Windows95 now works as it should; also you will find that all properties are now shown on the right-mouse menu, which allows you to work on full-screen forms with the property-watcher rolled up most of the time.

Other Updates
CPro.MakeAsleep – makes form without showing it or refreshing any controls. Useful as a means of making ‘heavy’ dialogues in advance while the user expects a delay.

CPro.Build – runs the code from Initialise as it is easy to forget to run this if you have moved Causeway (for example) into ŒSE. Now you can just relocate the namespaces, set ŒSE.Designer.‘causeway and Build.

The simple statusbar can now hide and show itself on demand (new runtime property ‘Visible’) and also automatically adjusts the positions of any other objects mentioned in the groups in its ‘Controls’ property. Similar to the tool control and the splitter bars.

The supplied functions from the Win and GuiPbar namespaces are now fully documented; also Win.Fbx has been updated to cope with a particularly nasty change in the default behaviour from Windows98 onwards. If no directory is given, the Win95 default is to look in the current working directory; Win 98 looks in ‘My Documents’ which is about as unhelpful as you can get. This has been over-ridden by explicitly setting the current directory before calling the filebox. Also the progress bar has been updated to allow you to set the button caption and specify a message such as ‘Printing page ? of #’ rather than just ‘1 of n’.