Questions & Answers from Ten Things You Didn't Know About AccuTerm 7 webinar - March 12, 2014
Below you can find the Q&A from the March 12, 2014 Ten Things You Didn't Know About AccuTerm 7 webinar. If you have any questions not seen here, please feel free to contact us. As part of the webinar, now through March 31, 2014, Pick Cloud, Inc. in conjunction with AccuSoft Enterprises is offering an exclusive 25% discount on AccuTerm 7 products. To take advantage of this offer go here.
Q. Can I use AccuTerm to connect to my server in the Pick Cloud?
A. Absolutely. It is recommended that you use secure shell, or SSL telnet when connecting over the Internet.
Q. When displaying images on the screen, what are the best ways to handle resizing issues with image placement? A. The escape sequence for displaying images on the text screen has optional size arguments for scaling the image to fit the screen. The size is specified in screen columns & rows, and the image will be scaled to fit the specified size. An argument is also available to specify whether the original image aspect ratio should be preserved. See the online help “AccuTerm programming” topic for more details. Q. When launching a GUI application, how can I configure the GUI server's gray box from appearing in the center of my screen?
A. The gray box is there to inform the user that the session is busy serving the GUI process and cannot be suppressed. You can use a simple script to minimize or hide the main AccuTerm window while the GUI is running. Q. Are mouse clicks into or out of fields recognized? Are there processes that can be executed when a field is entered into (not just when leaving the field)? Can you highlight and copy labels and values in boxes? Some clients like to do this 'screen scraping' into emails. Can display only fields be 'greyed out'? A. Yes. Mostly. There Activate, Deactivate and Validate events that fire as the active control changes – either due to mouse clicks or Tab or Enter key. You can enable or disable (grey out) pretty much anything. You can highlight text in edit fields as long as they are not disabled. You can cut, copy and paste text in edit fields (unless you create your own custom popup menu that has these functions disabled or missing). Q. How do you eliminate page breaks when converting a report to.txt so we can show it in Excel.
A. This depends on the database. For D3, you can set the page length to zero using the TERM command. For QM, you need to set the page length to the max of 32767 using the TERM command. For other MV flavors you need to check the documentation, but it’s probably similar.
Q. Is there a way to speed up FTServer? A. If this is specific to AIX, please search the forum for postings on AIX for tweaks that might help. If this is regarding using FTSERVER as a server from an Excel macro (or similar), one thing that might help is to reduce the number of calls to the server process. Perhaps calling a subroutine that returns several pieces of data instead of making one call for each datum.
Q. Are all the demos from the webinar available for download? A. Most of them. Some are installed as sample programs when you install the host programs. Some (AT.SEND.MAIL.xxxx) can be downloaded from the “technical articles” on the support page of the web site.
Q. Are there any known performance issues (i.e. slowdown) when doing GUI applications?
A. There are some “best practices” that help keep GUI apps responsive. There are quite a few threads on the forums about this. When beginning to learn GUI, it’s best not to think about this too much and concentrate on getting a functional app. But, it’s worth a scan of the GUI topics on the forum so you know what to expect.
Q. Does AccuTerm run on AIX?
A. AccuTerm runs fine on AIX (d3, jbase, U2, etc. running on AIX). Certain functions are slower on AIX due to bugs in the telnet server on AIX. There are some tweaks that might help (search the forum for ‘AIX’).
Q. In GUI mode, if you have a program that does a SORT or any TCL type display statement to the screen, does it do anything to make it display 'better' (i.e. display in text type box, html display, or anything).
A. No. But you could use EXECUTE … CAPTURING … to capture the output, and display it in a list box or multi-line text box in a GUI form.
Q. Are there updates to AT7 that we should be utilizing?
A. The current release is 7.1b-sp1 which was released in February 2014. There is a link on the About box to check for updates.
Q. Can we run multiple session/connections in separate windows, rather than tabbed MDI documents?
A. The File menu in AccuTerm always opens a new tab in the same window, but if you un-check the “use single instance of AccuTerm” setting in the General page of the settings, launching AccuTerm from the desktop or start menu will open separate windows.
Q. Is there support for running as GUI & character-based from the same program? I thought I'd seen that promoted as a feature.
A. You can suspend the GUI and run in character mode any time you want. Then resume the GUI to switch back where you left off. You cannot run both simultaneously, since the Pick process is single threaded (only runs one program at a time).
Q. Is AccuTerm not compatible with OpenOffice, even though OpenOffice reads/writes Excel files (xls & xlsx)?
A. Correct – AccuTerm uses Excel’s automation interface to drive Excel. Last time I checked, OpenOffice uses a different object model. I suppose it would be possible to adapt the code to use OpenOffice if there were enough demand.