One of the changes we wanted to make with EditTables in v10 was to expose all of their runtime functionality easily through the normal property/method API.  Some of this was already available in previous versions, but usually involved a method to set a plethora of style bits, which is not really satisfactory unless you’re a C++ programmer (as we have been reminded by various developers on several occasions!).

Besides the EditTable as a whole, there are essentially three other main programmable areas:

  1. Columns
  2. Rows
  3. Cells

Providing unique properties and methods to address the capabilities of these areas is not really practicable, as it leads to an “explosion” of property names: For example, accessing the “text” associated with each of these would require three new properties such as:

  • COLUMNTEXT
  • ROWTEXT
  • CELLTEXT

Of course that’s only three, but considering that each of the aforementioned areas has something like 30 properties, you would suddenly add 90+ new property names to the product!  Bear in mind also that columns, rows and cells each have many properties like TEXT in common, so a new name for each of these seems extremely wasteful and unnecessary.

(We could also have used something similar like the existing TEXTBYPOS method to achieve this, but then we’d have 30’ish new “BYPOS” methods instead, and methods aren’t properties anyway).

So, to keep the property namespace under control we decided to use this commonality and implement a set of  “sub-objects” instead, one for each area.  Unsurprisingly these are named:

  • COLUMNS
  • ROWS
  • CELLS  

Each of these sub-objects are indexed and can be used to access a specific column, row or cell in the EditTable.  They all share many common properties and methods, but also expose a few type-specific ones as well.   As an example, this is how to set the CUEBANNER property for each sub-object:

ctrlEntID  = @window : ".EDT_TEST"
cueBanner  = "Test"

// Set the CUEBANNER for the second column
call set_Property( ctrlEntID : ".COLUMNS", "CUEBANNER", cueBanner, 2 )
// Set the CUEBANNER for the third row
call set_Property( ctrlEntID : ".ROWS", "CUEBANNER", cueBanner, 3 )

// Set the CUEBANNER for the cell at column 5, row 7
call set_Property( ctrlEntID : ".CELLS", "CUEBANNER", cueBanner, 5 : @fm : 7 )

// And here's the same using Object Notation Syntax
@ctrlEntID.columns{2}->cueBannner = cueBanner
@ctrlEntID.rows{3}->cueBannner    = cueBanner
@ctrlEntID.cells{5,7}->cueBannner = cueBanner

We’ll take a look at each of these sub-objects in turn over the next few posts to examine their functionality in more detail.