Visual Designer questions

[taherte]

We're evaluating Profound UI so I am very much a novice in using the Designer. There are two functions that either I have not found yet or don't exist:
1. WYSIWYG. How do you see how much room the fields on a screen are going to take up? I'm used to SDA and RDp Screen designer. With those products I can see exactly what the screen will look like and whether I have room to fit something on the screen. Can I do this with the Visual Designer?

2. Multi-record display. Is there a way to see multiple record formats simultaneously? For example, some display files have heading and command key record formats that are separate from the rest of the screen. If I'm working on the "body" of the screen, can I see these other record formats too?

[Brian]

1. Not sure I understand your meaning. the Designer is WYSIWYG. The placement of a widget will be exactly as it will render. Perhaps you can attach a screen shot to help explain what you are looking for.

2. You are looking for the "Design Overlay Formats" property. Click on the screen name you want to edit and search the properties pane for this property. Use the prompt button to select records to include in the designer.

[taherte]

I've attached a very simplistic example to illustrate my question about WYSIWYG. On this screen:

• S_HDG1 is a character field with length 40.
  S_HDG2 and S_HDG3 are character fields with length 56.
  Field0001 is character 80.

As you can see, none of these fields display their "true" length.

[Brian]

Ok, now I see what you are looking for. Unfortunately, this is not that easy. Here's the thing. In a character based display like 5250, widths are easy as each character is exactly the same size. In the web world, there are a lot of factors involved, such as non fixed width fonts and different font sizes (you can even control the amount of white space between characters). That 80 character field could take up different amounts of space depending on what characters and settings are used.

You can however set the width property which will limit the width of the element if you are working in a tight space. Of course your width on a web page is not limited to a specific value, so you can always make more room for yourself. By specifying a width property and setting the "overflow x" property to "hidden", you can ensure that an element will never run over into the space of another widget.

Hope that clarifies a bit.