Open File Dialog

[Thomas Garvey]

Has anyone developed an 'Open File' dialog using PUI? I can only imagine the complexity at this point but, care to share it?

[Scott Klement]

Do you mean to browse the contents of the IFS, showing icons for each thing, etc?

Or do you mean for the user's local PC? On the PC, the "open" dialog has to be provided by the browser itself -- since a browser will not let you access the PC's hard drive directly. Check out the upload widget, for example, when you try to add a file it'll bring up a file open dialog.... this is produced by the browser, and may be exactly what you're looking for?

[Thomas Garvey]

Hi, Scott,

Hope your presence and response is evidence of your complete recovery.

I was hoping for an open dialog that either allowed selection of an i5 library and then drill down to it's objects, and/or the ability to drill down through the IFS directory.

Tom Garvey

[Scott Klement]

Tom, sadly I will never be 'completely' recovered. Damage to my spinal cord prevents my brain from having proper communications with some of my muscles. But, I have come a long way, I can take care of myself, I can walk with a cane, I can drive a car, etc... Though, my posting these messages doesn't have much to do with that. :-) I could do my job just fine from a wheelchair -- in fact, I've been back at work full-time since Feb 2013, so about a year now. Thanks for the concern and well-wishes!

I haven't written an open file dialog like you're referring to, though I could if I needed to. I'm finding this to be an unusual request, though... I can't recall hearing of an RPG program where you can select which physical/logical file to open in a dialog like this. Usually, RPG programs are designed to work with a file that has a very specific format (fields with particular names, data types, sizes, etc, in a particular record.) So you can't usually just pick a file from a list of everything in a library. (Plus, remember, libraries can contain other object types like programs, commands, data areas, non-data files, etc).

I guess there might be a group of files that are useful to select from, such as PFs that have the same format, but are given different names to correspond to different company codes, or different archived years, or something like that. But you'd want the "open" dialog restricted to just those files in that case, it wouldn't make sense for it to generically list everything in a library.

Can you explain your circumstances a little more?

[Thomas Garvey]

Glad to hear you are still recovering then.

We need to deliver our Unbeaten Path software (some developed using PUI) to clients, just like ProfoundLogic does.

We had a PC tool that helped us do that but the manufacturer went belly up and the thing doesn't run on Windows7/8 or 64 but PC's.
I am writing an in-house tool that allows selection of i5 libraries/objects to save, then zips those files, and enables a PC ftp process that allows transfer of those libraries/objects to client systems.

I know I can write it, I just wanted to get a head start if someone else already invented the wheel. If anyone had, I knew you'd be the one.

Thanks,

Tom Garvey

[Scott Klement]

No, unfortunately, I have not. You might consider doing something like DSPOBJD to *OUTFILE (or maybe QUSLOBJ API instead), then loading the relevant records into a subfile on a PUI screen. It wouldn't look exactly like a file open dialog, but would be simple enough to do, and should be user friendly.

Would that work?