Good morning

In re-programming the one thing I always need is an Action: Save & Form Close in one function

Is that possible or does it already exist?

It doesn’t exist as one action but it is quite easy to do in two actions.

It was a big limitation that one could only have one action on a button when buttons was presented in Express back in 1992. Everyone hoped that it would be amended when DFW came out, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t in fact amended until the library CDF library DFWACTS was introduced in the mid 1990s.

When this was introduced one was able to use the Execute CDF action to combine several CDFs (actions) together.

In 7.0 these CDFs was converted to internal functions and available the same way as all other functions. It was a little know “secret” that Execute CDF in reality meant execute any function (derivation) so this feature has been under utilised by the DataEase community.

In DE8 we changed this action to Execute Function/Derivation to make this more obvious:

The following derivation will do what you want:



Here you can see all the Actions that was converted to functions and the function names:
http://www.dataease.com/dg3_HelpView/?PageID=13720&field1=*DFWACTS%20-%20Actions%20as%20Functions*

Thanks

Something to be added!

Graham

Hi Graham.

Rather the opposite ;-)

Actions have never ?sat well? with me. It is one step to far in ?humanizing? the programming part of DataEase.

I strongly believe that most things should be easy and understandable, but it is better to make the programming bit understandable rather than ?fuzzy it up? the way they have done with actions.

Due to the way Actions is done and the way they are ?named? it is just a long list of unrelated stuff that you have to browse through endlessly to find the ?correct? one.

The nice thing with good function names is that they can group functions together and be self-explanatory.

DFW went too far in ?dumming? DataEase down, we can?t get around the fact that one need to ?program? (DQL,Derivations etc) and it is better to makes sure this is easy and understandable (DFD) than to try to make it ?English? the way of actions.

In my mind it would be better if all the actions was removed and the only action left was ?Execute Function/Derivation? with a very good interactive agent for helping you build the derivation. One thing I do a lot is SaveRecord()+SetVar("MyFilter","Filtervalue")+DocumentClose()+OpenForm(), imagine making an action for that and all the possible combinations?

Only if developers embrace the programming bit of DataEase will they truly be able to make great individual applications, so our job should be to make this transition easier rather than try to stop them from making this transition.