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Seattle Magic Users Group Newsletter
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 | Next Meeting: April 10 |
| Magic With Style Class |
| Selection Menus |
| F12, From the Internet Group |
| ADDRESSES |
| Directions to SUPERVALU INTERNATIONAL |
Meeting will be hosted by SUPERVALU INTERNATIONAL at noon. See directions below, or call Aaron at (206) 593-3198 for more details.
John Cole's Debugger application will be demonstrated. SVI will give a tour of their Magic Order Entry/Shipping application.
Heidi Schuppenhauer
Trillium Custom Software, Inc. will be offering a Magic With Style class to Magicians, and would-be Magicians, in the Seattle area. This will be an 8 week course, taught once a week in the evenings. Mastering Magic will be used as a text, and there will be several hours of homework per week, which will be graded.
The idea for the class grew out of a need some people have felt to do more in depth Magic training. The one-week intensive classes are fine, and sometimes the only thing that will fit into a schedule, but there seems to be also a need for longer-term classes.
The class will be for beginners or advanced Magicians. Basics of Magic will be covered, but with discussion of standards and what makes a good program.
Anyone interested should contact Heidi or Dale Schuppenhauer at (360) 568-9054.
Magic's built-in menu system works pretty well for most applications, and it follows the standard Windows-application standards. However, sometimes you may want to use something else. For instance, if a group of users is used to a certain menu style, used in older mainframe applications, that shows 20-40 choices on a screen, allowing the user to click on one item to run it. Or, in the case of reports, if you have 50-300 reports in your system (not unusual, unfortunately!) you may want to come up with a mechanism to make it easier for the user to find the report they are looking for. Below is a discussion of the two problems.
Mainframe type menus
The first type of menu is one found commonly on mainframes, AS400's, and VAX's. On these menus there are subheaders, then lists of items the user can choose, usually by tabbing down and pressing 'ENTER', or typing in a letter key, as shown below:
ORDER ENTRY
__ A. Place Order
__ B. Check Orders
__ C. Print Order
SHIPPING
__ D. Enter Shipment
__ E. Check Shipment
These menus do not adhere to the Windows standard. Problem is, they are very convenient, and the users might not want to give them up just because you are converting their old mainframe system. Also, they make training new users easier: all the components of one person's job can be on one screen.
Obviously, this could also be a row of push buttons, but push buttons take up more screen real estate, particularly in text mode. For the VMS platform, there is no Magic 6.0 yet. Using plain text fields allows for more menu items.
The obvious solution would be to create a virtual field for each window entry, and make that field a ZOOM field, and tell the user to press F. or F2. However, if our goal is to not retrain the users, it would be better to use ENTER or double-click.
So how to do it? The answer is very simple, and has applications for other situations. You create a subtask, called 'ZOOM', a batch task that executes a single command: KBPUT('Zoom'ACT).
Then, in your parent task, you set up a task event that calls 'ZOOM' whenever 'ENTER' is pressed.
Now, in your menu, each item is indeed a Zoom field, but the user just presses ENTER. You can use this methodology to create look alike pop-up or pull-down menus too, with multiple rows and columns.
Reports
The second menu problem comes up when you have lots of reports. As a system gets larger, you get more and more users confused as to where the 'Monthly Sales Report' resides. Sometimes they even call the programmer. Problem is, I don't know where the 'Monthly Sales Report' is either. In fact, there may be 3-4 reports by that or similar titles, one with financial data for the financial group, one for the sales group, one for the CEO.
I recently came up with the beginnings of a solution to this problem that seem to work pretty well.
1. Give every report a number. It doesn't really matter what the number is, but it's nice to use some sort of system (like, two letters for the susbsystem, plus a sequential identifier : OE1002 for instance.
2. Number each program in your program dictionary with the same unique number (preferably at the beginning, to make locates easy:
OE1002 Monthly Sales Rpt.
3. Create a database that stores the report number, the report name, and a long memo field describing what the report does (the users can edit this one), and maybe some search fields for the subsystem ('Order Entry') or who is allowed to run it.
4. Create one driver program that calls a program based on a program number that is passed in. If 'OE1002' is passed in, it will call 'OE1002 Monthly Sales Rpt'.
5. Now, you can create screens so the user can either type in 'OE1002' (if they have a copy of the report they want to run, they can just copy the number in the corner), or, so they can select the report off a picklist.
My users also had me write an 'AI' or '20 questions' type screen that led the users through a series of questions to determine what report they were looking for.
This method has a nice side effect: the users, when reporting problems or enhancements, can refer to the report number, and I can find the report very easily in my (rather large) program dictionary by just doing a Locate.
As you've probably found out, you can't directly use the F12 key in Magic. But M. C. Adams reports that you can code KBGET()=<F12> in the Expression column to use it to call a task or program ...
MSE:http: //www.magic-sw.com
Tech Support: msetech@earthlink.net
Sales:
sales@mse.mhs.compuserve.com
Magic BBS: User your modem communication software to
call (714) 250-8945.
FAX on Demand: Call (800) 697-1414
Magic Intl. Users Group: magic-users@zeus.lnk.com
{Original map not included in WWW version}
For information about the Seattle Magic Users Group, please send snail mail requests
to:
Conjurings C/O Trillium Custom Software, Inc.
PO BOX 609
Lake Stevens, WA 98258
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