Scrollbars with Expanding subfile

[MLC601]

Is there any way to use scroll bars with expanding subfiles? (subfiles where a page is added to the subfile on each page down). The Next/Previous links in the paging bar work correctly, but I don't see a way to make the scrollbars work (sliding or paging).

Any advice?

Thanks,

Mark

[David]

Yes, you can use the scrollbar in conjunction with expanding subfiles.

1. If set to 'sliding', the scrollbar will appear automatically if the RPG program loads more records into the subfile than the 'number of rows' property.

I think this is probably what you are looking for. So, if your grid is showing 20 records at a time, but the RPG program actually loads 50 in the page, the scrollbar will allow you to view the other 30.

You can still then page down to get another 50 (or whatever amount) from the RPG program.

2. If set to 'paging', then the scrollbar will have the effect of operating the page up / page down. This is more commonly used in Genie (browser-based 5250 emulation) than in a Profound UI display file.

[Scott Klement]

Personally, when I do an "expanding" subfile, I prefer to use a 'paging' scrollbar.

Sliding tends to confuse the user, since it shows them at the end of the subfile, even though there are more pages (that just haven't loaded yet -- that's the nature of an expanding subfile.)

Having said that... it's pretty rare to need expanding subfiles these days. They made a lot of sense in the old days when computers and disks were slow -- but today, the time it takes to load 10,000 records into a subfile is trivial. So... I either use a load-all subfile (which, by far, works the best with a scrollbar, export to excel, or sortable columns) or for massive amounts of data, I'll do a page-at-a-time subfile. There's not much reason for an expanding subfile, imho. Unless the data is really hard to gather, takes a lot of time to gather... that's the only time I use an expanding subfile.

[MLC601]

Scott,

I agree that most of the time expanding subfiles aren't needed anymore, however, we're converting an existing application to use Profound UI and we'd like to keep any changes to a minimum at this time.

I'm attempting to use the paging scrollbar, but I've noticed that the behavior seems to differ from the Previous/Next links in the paging bar in that control is returned to the RPG program when the paging scrollbar is moved regardless whether the subfile 'page' that is to be displayed has already been loaded whereas the paging bar controls scroll the grid on the client and only pass control (on the PageDown) back to the RPG program when an additional page needs to be loaded.


We're running Version 4.5.3

Thanks,

Mark

[David]

It looks like there are currently some issues here. We'll look into them and correct it.

However, the paging scrollbar may not work entirely as you'd expect, even then. Basically, the paging scrollbar is a feature that was originally put in for Genie (5250 screen scraping) to provide a nicer effect for pressing page up and page down.

When used in this mode, the scrollbar does not truly scroll like you'd expect, as "real" scrolling is only possible when the number of records are known.

So, we should be able to correct the issues, but it won't have the same "feel" that you'd normally expect from a scrollbar.

[MLC601]

Thanks David! I'll be watching for the fix.

We're currently using both the Paging scrollbar on some page at a time subfiles. As long as the behavior is similar with an expanding subfile, that should be fine.

Mark

[MLC601]

I've installed version 4.6.1 and am still seeing some strange behavior with expanding subfiles even without using the paging scroll bar. I put "PageUp" & "PageDown" buttons on the screen. The response indicator on the "Page Down" is the same as the "Page down response" property defined on the grid. These buttons have the Page Up & Page Down shortcut keys defined as well. The "Page Up" button has no response variable defined.

As before, the Next/Previous paging bar controls work just fine. The "Page Down" button works correctly as well, but the "Page Up" doesn't. When the page up button is clicked, control is returned to the RPG program which doesn't know what to do in this case, but when the Previous link is clicked, no control is returned to the program and the previous page in the grid is displayed.

my plan was to simply hide my "Page Up" & "Page Down" buttons and click them with a pui.click() in the onpageup and onpagedown events with the scroll bar defined as "Paging". This seems to work fine with page-at-a-time subfiles.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Mark

[David]

The behavior you're describing in this latest post seems normal. A button (outside of the paging bar) will always return control to RPG if either a response indicator or short cut key are defined. Only the links in the paging bar itself will manage paging the grid through records which were already received from RPG.

[MLC601]

Is there any way to get the paging scrollbar to act like the paging bar links or the PageUp/Down keys? Particularly the page up as the page down works fine? I tried binding the PUI_PgUp indicator to the page up response property. This seems to work but only once.

Given an expanding subfile with a total of 3 pages worth of data after paging down to the last page: the paging scrollbar page up will work one time (back to page 2). The scroll bar stays at the top of the grid instead of resetting to the center and no longer functions for either the page up or down.

The page up/down keys and the paging bar links continue to function properly.

We're running Profound version 4.6.1

Mark

[David]

There is not currently a way to make the scrollbar work like the links, although we are looking into the fixes before that I mentioned that will enable this.

Sorry.

I can let you know when there is some update here.